He works at Gilly Lab, Hopkins Marine Station, in Monterey County, as a professor of biology, at Stanford University[1] and was involved with the television special The Future is Wild.
Additional physiological studies made in the living squid revealed unexpected complexities in how the giant axon system controls escape responses, and how mechanisms governing that control are subject to modification by environmental factors like temperature and during normal development.
Fieldwork in the Gulf of California[2][3] near Santa Rosalía, Baja California Sur[4] and off Monterey Bay employs a variety of tagging methodologies in order to track short-term diel vertical migrations as well as long-distance migrations.
Gilly was nominated by Stanford University to be one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Speakers who spoke about his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010.
Gilly is an avid fan of John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, Robinson Jeffers and other notable characters in the Monterey peninsula.