[5] As a Jefferson Science Fellow Davies monitored developments in agriculture and food security, monitored the status of biotech crops in Europe, and provided input to promote the acceptance of these crops on a scientific basis.

He did a post doc with Arthur Galston and an instructor in the Biology Department at Yale University.

In 1866, Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, demonstrated that height in peas was controlled by a single factor.

More than a century later, Davies discovered that Mendel's stem length gene (Le) in peas encoded a gibberellin 3β-hydroxylase.

[18] He was a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Università di Bologna, Italy in 2010, an OECD (Trade Agriculture) Research Fellow at the Università di Bologna, Italy in 2010, a Jefferson Science Fellow in the United States Department of State from 2011 to 2014[19] and was made an International Professor of Plant Biology at Cornell University in 2013.