Daniels-Race joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at Duke University in 1989, where she established the university's first molecular beam epitaxy laboratory and founded their experimental research programme into III-IV semiconductor materials, with federal funding from the National Science Foundation. She was a visiting scholar at the Microelectronics Research Center at the University Texas Austin in spring 1995. From 2001 to 2003, she was awarded funding from the US Department of Energy to investigate the effects of variation in molecular beam epitaxy growth of tensile-strained two-dimensional structures. Her work at Duke was also focused on studying quantum mechanical phenomena such as electron - phonon interactions, and developing microelectronic devices based on GaAs, AlGaAs and InAlAs quantum wells.