William Conan Davis

Education William Conan Davis was born on August 22, 1926, in Waycross, Georgia to Kince Charles Davis and his wife Laura Jane (née Cooper; July 9, 1898 – June 6, 2004). Kince Davis' family self-identified as being of Ethiopian Jewish descent, and he read Hebrew but not English. He later started a herbal medicine business, the only source of medical care accessible to many black people in Georgia. William Davis spent time during the summers with his maternal grandfather Jonnas Franklin, who identified as a Sioux Indian and who farmed and hunted near the Okefenokee Swamp.

William Davis attended Magnolia Grammar School and Dasher High School in Valdosta, Georgia. He received a high school diploma from Dasher in 1944.

While completing his doctorate, Davis worked with scientists at Washington State University in a variety of fields, including clinical research with Mark Adams. His Ph.D. thesis was A Study of Sloughing in the Potato Tuber (1965). He was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Idaho. Using his knowledge of radioimmunoassay techniques Davis developed standardized tests for the detection of thyroxin in the blood stream.

Davis was recruited as a health physicist and became head of the radioactivity department at United Medical Laboratories in Portland, Oregon. Following certification as a medial technologist, Davis became director of the laboratory.

[At United Medical Laboratories] we provided analyses for doctors all over the world, and devised methods for reducing the time and cost of conducting clinical assays to develop detect concentrations of hormones and steroids in the blood such as aldosterone, estrogen, and testosterone ... We made exotic procedures routine and brought their price down. Using autoanalyzers when they had just come out, we could perform tests more quickly than they could be done locally. In 1972, Davis helped put on the Black Community Survival Conference, a protest against the expansion of the Emanuel Hospital. The expansion was planned without community input and largely destroyed the commercial center of a historically black neighborhood.

From 1974 to 1975, Davis was a visiting scientist at the George Hyman Research Institute in Washington, D.C. From 1979 to 1982, Davis was a research associate in Molecular Pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas.

In 1983, Davis was hired as an instructor in the chemistry department at St. Philip's College, giving him more opportunity for teaching as well as research. He became a full professor of chemistry in 1995. He became the chair of the Natural Sciences Department in 1996. a product of The Coca-Cola Company. In addition to hydrology, Davis was interested in recombinant DNA and fuel cell technologies for renewable energy. A portrait of William Davis, commissioned from Howard Rhoder, hangs in the science building. Davis awarded the St. Phillips College

Davis was also active in preserving the history of science. He helped to establish the Ernest Stevenson Collection of scientific books and artifacts, to be housed at the Sutton Learning Center at St. Philip's College. one of 16 charter members 2020, Genius Award, Liberty Science Center

Memberships American Chemical Society Society of Nuclear Medicine American Association for the Advancement of Science