"went on to discover" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to signify that someone continued on to make a discovery. For example: "In 1933, Marie Curie went on to discover a new element, yet she failed to win a Nobel Prize for her work."
He then went on to discover previously unrecognized inherited disorders.
From there, Dr. Neel went on to discover the "Neel patterns" of magnetism in material.
She went on to discover the first complete plesiosaur and a pterosaur.
Tuttle went on to discover that bats found hiding places that he hadn't anticipated, far beyond his shirtsleeves.
She went on to discover socially conscious Arabic-speaking songwriters like Sheikh Imam, from Egypt, and Marcel Khalife, from Lebanon.
But his children, he added, then went on to discover advanced printer functions with which he was unfamiliar.
Anning's discovery marked her as one of the most important, though unacknowledged, paleontologists; she would go on to discover the first plesiosaur and the first British pterosaur.
Not represented there, obviously, are those who find the easier puzzles a welcome introduction to the wonderful world of the cryptic crossword and who then go on to discover that they can derive pleasure from tackling the more difficult ones, even if they cannot regularly or even ever fully complete them.
Another convention of the ghost story – obeyed by both James and Hill – is that the protagonist is not told a truth that he or she will go on to discover.
But he may go on to discover that high political ambition can be more cruelly mocked when it succeeds than when it is thwarted by defeat.
By reading them in tandem, Danticat unites them into a single narrative: after the girl is warned by her mother about the dangers of her world, she goes on to discover them for herself.
