She is the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the department of chemistry at the University of Chicago and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

Galli earned her PhD in physics in 1987 from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.

She held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Richard Martin, and the IBM Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland.

[4] Galli's research activity focuses on the development and use of computational methods to understand and predict the behavior of solids, liquids and nanostructures from first principles.

[6] Galli's software activities are focused on the development of the WEST code (large-scale electronic structure within many-body perturbation theory)[7] and participation in the development of the Qbox code (ab initio molecular dynamics) led by Francois Gygi at University of California, Davis,[8] both of which are supported by MICCoM.