He is the director of and Avery Family Professor of Immunology at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University.

[3][4] Davis was educated at Johns Hopkins University[3] and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research supervised by Leroy E.

[3][5] Davis is well known for identifying the first T-cell receptor genes, which are responsible for T lymphocytes ability to "see" foreign entities, solving a major mystery in immunology at that time.

In recent years his has increasingly focused on understanding the human immune system, from developing broad systems biology approaches to inventing new methods to help unravel the complexities of T cell responses to cancer, autoimmunity and infectious diseases.

[2][6][7][8] Davis has won numerous awards including: All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License."