He also played basketball for the Florida State Seminoles basketball team for one season. 322 for the Seminoles baseball team, with 48 stolen bases. In his senior year at Florida State he batted. Gilbert earned a bachelor's degree in finance from Florida State University. He was a High School All American in basketball, and All State in baseball. Gilbert starred in baseball, basketball (as a point guard), and track at Churchill High School in Pennsylvania (which later merged with two other schools forming Woodland Hills High School), and subsequently at Pine Crest High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Gilbert served for three terms as the President of B'nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton, Florida, and the Gilberts live in Boca Raton. The couple has two daughters, Dani and Elizabeth.

She owns The Masorti Travel Bureau, which developed the itinerary of the first trip of Birthright Israel, an organization that arranges free trips to Israel for first-time visiting Jewish students ages 18 to 25. His father Herbert had played professional baseball as an infielder with the Chicago White Sox organization (reaching Triple A), and his grandfather Joseph Gilbert had played semi-pro baseball as a pitcher and been offered a pro baseball contract with the 1919 Philadelphia Athletics. He was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his younger brother and sister until 1973, when they moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, where his father and grandfather owned a furniture store. Gilbert is Jewish, and was born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia. Senate confirmed Gilbert on December 12, 2014. In 2013, United States President Barack Obama nominated Gilbert to be United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Subsequently, he had a career as an investment banker. Gilbert played for the Chicago White Sox in 1985. Mark David Gilbert (born August 22, 1956) is a former outfielder in Major League Baseball who served as the United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa from 2015 to 2017.

Churchill gilbert