A physicist, Galli-Shohat attended the Women's University of St. Petersburg, 1899-1903, and earned her Ph.D. in physics from Gt̲tingen in 1913. She was professor of physics at the Ural University in the Soviet Union, 1917-1922. Galli-Shohat came to the United States by 1925, and became assistant professor at the University of Michigan. From 1929 to 1933 she taught physics at Mount Holyoke College, and then spent two years at Bryn Mawr College, 1933-1935; her research there led to the publication of a paper, "A Study, by Means of Huygens Principle, of the Reflection of a Spherical Light Wave from a Moving Plane Mirror" (1935).