Gerty, born in 1896 in Prague, was educated in Europe. She earned her medical degree in 1920 and married Carl the same year. A few years later, they immigrated to the United States. Gerty became an assistant pathologist at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo. They moved to St. Louis in 1931, where Carl had been offered the Chair of the Pharmacology Department at the Washington University School of Medicine. Despite her brilliant research, she was not offered a regular faculty position and was employed initially as a research associate in pharmacology and biochemistry. In the early 1940s, the Coris moved to the Department of Biological Chemistry. She became associate professor of pharmacology and biological chemistry in 1943, and in 1947, the same year as winning the Nobel Prize, was promoted to full professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry. (The department has since been renamed to the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics.)

For decades Gerty and Carl collaborated together, sharing a passion for laboratory research. Experimenting with minced skeletal muscle from frogs, the Coris determined a new intermediate of glycogen breakdown which they described as glucose-1-phosphate (known as the Cori ester). They established the compound’s structure and discovered the enzyme that catalyzed its formation, which they named phosphorylase. They crystallized the enzyme glycogen phosphorylase from muscle and investigated its chemical properties. This groundbreaking research into the enzyme-catalyzed chemical reactions of carbohydrate metabolism resulted in the awarding of the Nobel Prize shared with Dr. Bernardo Houssay.

Among her other honors and awards are election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Midwest Award of the American Chemical Society, the Squibb Award in endocrinology, the Garvan Medal, the Women's National Press Award, the Sugar Research Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Borden Foundation Award for outstanding medical research. She received honorary degrees from Smith College, Yale University and University of Rochester. She was also one of twelve women honored at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. in 1949, at ceremonies of the first medical degree bestowed on a woman. In 1952, President Harry Truman named her to the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation.

Her colleagues knew her to be hard-driven, witty, and a perfectionist with everything she attempted. In an era when female scientists were uncommon, she broke barriers, paving the way for future women who desired careers in research. Even fighting myelofibrosis for a decade, she continued to spend long hours working in the laboratory, until the last few months of her life. She died in 1957.