Gully studied undergraduate physics and during an early-morning lecture on high-energy particle detectors, he had a powerful realization that he wanted to study neuroscience. Early in his doctorate work, he discovered that biology's foundations were not at all similar to the mathematical principles he was used to and in an attempt to remedy this, started to build biomedical knowledge engineering applications. He worked as a postdoc with Larry Swanson at University of Southern California building software (and doing a little experimental neuroanatomy), and was awarded his first independent RO1 at the age of 31. In 2006, he moved to the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) to start a research group and was made a Project Leader in 2009. He is currently the chair of the BIRN Knowledge Engineering Working Group and his group uses AI techniques (NLP, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Ontologies, etc.) to build pragmatic knowledge-oriented systems for biomedical scientists.