Davis' work has been in
physical cosmology and he has done a number of significant projects. While at Harvard, he led the CfA (
Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian) galaxy
survey, the first
redshift survey of galaxies, which motivated his interest in
N-body simulations of the Universe. In the 1980s, at Berkeley, he was part of a collaboration with
George Efstathiou,
Carlos Frenk and
Simon White that established the validity of the "
cold dark matter" theory for the
formation of galaxies and other cosmic structures, now the accepted interpretation in cosmology. In a classic series of papers, that collaboration — often called DEFW by their peers — used computer code to simulate the growth of the universe and resolve disputes among theoretical models. Through the 1990s, Davis worked on the theoretically expected large scale flow of galaxies and led the redshift survey of the first all-sky catalog,
IRAS, with which he was able to estimate the flow of galaxies out to redshifts of order 6,000 km/s. He took up this project once again in 2010 using the gravity field estimated from
2MASS, and he and Nusser were able to estimate the field to redshift of order 10,000 km/s. He was the lead principal investigator on the ambitious
DEEP2 Redshift Survey of 50,000 high redshift galaxies. This was conducted on the
W. M. Keck Observatory in
Hawaii. The scientific goals of the DEEP survey were to study the properties of galaxies and the clustering of galaxies as the universe has evolved. He has also helped organize and run an all-sky model of
cosmic dust distribution in the
Milky Way. == Honors and awards ==