She was one of the ten students selected for the nationally awarded AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship Program to pursue her doctorate in electrical engineering at Cornell University with Lester F. Eastman. Daniels-Race's thesis was titled " A spectrometric study of high-energy electrons using planar-doped barrier (PBD) launchers ", and her research focused on developing a series of spectrometers based on PBD launchers to observe quantum mechanical phenomena. In her work, she used molecular beam epitaxy techniques to grow vertical field effect transistor spectrometers and demonstrated the first observation of hot electrons and ballistic transport effects in these systems. She obtained her Ph.D. in 1990, and was the 19th African American woman to earn a PhD in physics, astronomy or a related field in the United States.