His PhD research, culminating in a dissertation entitled Theoretical Investigations of Experimental Gravitation, was carried out under the supervision of Kip S. Thorne.

As a PhD student, Caves received the Richard P. Feynman Fellowship in 1976–77 and was the first recipient of the Öcsi Bácsi “Deeply Dedicated to Physics” Award in 1976.

In 2009 he was appointed the inaugural director of the Center for Quantum Information and Control (CQuIC), an interdisciplinary center at UNM and the University of Arizona, which investigates and develops a new generation of technologies for controlling the behavior of quantum systems.

This proposal prompted thirty years of technology development to design squeezed-light sources that can improve the exquisite sensitivity achieved by the very large interferometers that have been constructed to detect gravitational waves from astrophysical events.

In addition to his interest in quantum physics, Caves has also criticized J. Richard Gott’s use of a temporal Copernican principle to predict the future duration of a phenomenon based only knowing the phenomenon’s present age.

They have two children: Jeremy Caves Rugenstein, an assistant professor in the department of geosciences at Colorado State University,[12] and Eleanor Caves, currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Exeter[13] and, beginning August 2022, an assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution, and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.