[4] He was at the Department of Business Communication and Information Science of the University of Southern Denmark at Sønderborg (1998–2005), first as a lecturer, then as assistant professor and tenured associate professor; during that time, he also taught English linguistics part-time at the Department of British and American Studies of the University of Hamburg.
In 2005, he spent 10 months as a visiting scholar in the Psychology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, before he accepted a position at UCSB, starting November 1, 2005.
[19][20] Occasionally and mainly collaboratively, he also uses experimental methods (acceptability judgments, sentence completion, priming, self-paced reading times, and sorting tasks).
The researchers who have influenced his work most are R. Harald Baayen, Douglas Biber, Nick C. Ellis, Adele E. Goldberg, and Michael Tomasello.
Gries has co-edited a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics.