As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked with a scholarship of the National Research Council with Jacques Monod at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and with a grant from the National Science Foundation at the New York University in New York City.
In 1955, Hogness became an instructor of microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and was promoted to an assistant professor in 1957.
In 1989, he also became a joint faculty member in Stanford's newly created Department of Developmental Biology.
Hogness was essential to understanding the ontogeny of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly).
Hogness' work contributed to the discovery that the genetic material of eukaryotes consists of non-coding (introns) and coding (exons) sections and that the expression of numerous genes is regulated by so-called cis-elements.