 He visited Norway from 1951 to 1952 on a Fulbright fellowship to the Norwegian College of Agriculture, and took a faculty position at Pennsylvania State University in 1954.He moved to UCSD from a previous position at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962.In work done from 1946 through 1953, along with Melvin Calvin and James Bassham, Benson elucidated the path of carbon assimilation (the photosynthetic carbon reduction cycle) in plants.