[5] From 1920 to 1925 she worked at the University of Aberdeen as an assistant to William Grant Craib.
[1] In 1925, she received a Carnegie scholarship and became a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
There, she received in 1928 a PhD in botany with a dissertation on the morphology of the male gametophyte of Microcycas calocoma.
In 1927, she went to Cuba, where she collected cycads by riding on horseback through the Cordillera de Guaniguanico.
[5] At the University of Aberdeen, Downie worked as an assistant from 1928 to 1929, a lecturer from 1929 to 1949, and a reader from 1949 to 1960.