Davison was born in London. He attended the Warwick School, followed by the St. John's College, University of Oxford, where he obtained a B.A. in mathematics in 1980. He then studied at the Imperial College London and obtained a M.Sc. in statistics in 1981 with a project supervised by Martin Beale. He went on the obtain a Ph.D. in statistics in 1984 at the Imperial College London under the supervision of environmental scientist Helen ApSimon and statistician Richard L. Smith. Between 1984 and 1986, Davison was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States. He was a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at the Imperial College London from 1986 to 1989, and a university lecturer at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 1996.[1]
Davison, Anthony Christopher; Dodge, Yadolah; Wermuth, Nanny, eds. (2005). Celebrating statistics: papers in honour of Sir David Cox on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Oxford statistical science series. Oxford (GB): Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-856654-0.