Later Life
During World War II, Gibbs struggled to meet the department's commitments in the face of the departure of key members of staff to do war work, including Bethe and Bacher, who played key roles in the Manhattan Project. He retired from Cornell in 1946, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he became the chairman of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Division of the National Research Council. He subsequently became chairman of the advisory committee to the U. S. Army's Office of Ordnance Research. He was a consultant to the National Research Council's Nuclear Data Project, and the supervisor of its exchange-visitor program. He was also the editor of the Directory of Nuclear Data Tabulations for many years.
Gibbs a member of the Optical Society of America, serving as its president from 1937 to 1938, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and member of the American Association of Physics Teachers, serving as its president in 1942 and again from 1944 to 1946, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he was vice-president in 1945). He was also a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and was its president for a time.
He died on October 14, 1966.
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