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".