Young served as a National Research Council postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University for one year, before joining the faculty at UCLA, where he would remain for his entire career (through 1970).

In a series of over 30 subsequent publications, Young examined rate constants, substitution preference, stereochemistry, and alternate reaction sites of allyl transfers.

[3] He also collaborated with student groups to develop glassware and lab tools, for instance the ubiquitous glass helices found in fractionation columns used to separate isomeric volatiles.

[4] Perhaps Young's longest legacy – apart from his 130 research publications – was serving as the doctoral advisor to chemist and nuclear magnetic resonance pioneer John D.

He devoted his entire Priestley Medal address to issues of chemical education, given increasing pressures from post-World War II research enterprise expansion, increased student enrollment in the sciences, and the rapid adoption of newer analytical instrumentation – NMR, mass spectrometry, HPLC, infrared spectroscopy, among others – into undergraduate curricula.