Gries graduated from Queens College in 1960. He spent the following two years working as a programmer-mathematician for the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, where he met his wife, Elaine.

Gries earned his Master's degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963. While at Illinois, Gries worked with Manfred Paul and Ruediger Wiehle to write a full ALGOL compiler for the IBM 7090 computer. He earned his Dr. Rer. Nat. in 1966 from the Munich University of Technology, studying under Friedrich L. Bauer and Joseph Stoer.

Gries was an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1966—1969 and then became an associate professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He spent the next 30 years there, including a stint as Chair of the Computer Science department from 1982—1987. He had a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984—1985. He spent 1999—2002 at the University of Georgia in Athens and returned to Cornell in January 2003.

He is the author, co-author, or editor of seven textbooks and 75 research papers. David Gries currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Gries is the only recipient of four major educator awards in computer science:

• the American Federation of Information Processing Societies' Education Award (1986)
• the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education (1991)
• the Institute for Electrical Engineers Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award (1994)
• the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1995)

He holds two honorary doctorates:

• an honorary Doctor of Laws, Daniel Webster College, Nashua, New Hampshire (1996)
• an honorary Doctor of Science, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (1999)

and is among the first ten Cornell faculty awarded a Cornell Weiss Presidential Fellowship for contributions to undergraduate education.In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for co-authoring "An Axiomatic Proof Technique for Parallel Programs I".