In the late 1940s, he began antibiotic research with Mary Ethel Florey, a member of the Oxford team that developed penicillin for clinical use.
[2] Sherris, a pioneer in clinical microbiology, is known for his contributions to developing accurate and reliable methods for determining the antibiotic susceptibilities of bacteria sampled from patients.
He, with colleagues Alfred W. Bauer,[3] William M. M. Kirby,[4] and Marvin Turck,[5] developed and validated a method called "disk diffusion susceptibility testing".
[1] Continuing this work on antibiotic sensitivity testing, Sherris became a member of an international collaborative study sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO).
"[2] He was an outstanding teacher and promoted in the late 1960s the reform of the curriculum of the University of Washington Medical School.
With his wife Elizabeth doing the typing and indexing,[1] he was the editor-in-chief of the textbook Medical Microbiology: An Introduction to Infectious Diseases, published in 1984 by Elsevier.
[9] Sherris served on the editorial boards of The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and was the editor-in-chief of the ASM Cumitech series of clinical microbiology techniques.