Lila M. Gierasch, like her mother Marian Bookhout Gierasch, studied at Mount Holyoke College.^[1] She graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor's degree in chemistry. She then went to Harvard University as a doctoral student and earned her doctorate in biophysics in 1975. Since 1974 she taught at Amherst College, where she worked as an assistant professor in chemistry. She worked under Jean-Marie Lehn at Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg between 1977 and 1978. In 1979 she went to University of Delaware for a position as an assistant professor, and was promoted to a professor in chemistry in 1985. Gierasch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 for molecular and cellular biology.^[2] In 1988 she moved to University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and worked as a professor in pharmacology for six years. She was the chair of Robert A. Welch Professor of Biochemistry.

In Texas she met her husband John Pylant, whom she married in 1991.^[3] She returned to Massachusetts in 1994, and has been a Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology ever since. She is Head of the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of University of Massachusetts Amherst.^[4][5]

In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.^[6]