He holds the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology,[2] the director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency and a distinguished professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials at University of California, Santa Barbara.

[4] Bowers' research is focused on silicon photonic integrated circuits for fiber optic communications.

In 1987, he left AT&T to join University of California, Santa Barbara as a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering.

[12] In 1996, he was appointed as the director of Multidisciplinary Optical Switching Technology Center at UCSB and served in this position until 2003.

The institute's work is focused on driving low cost, high volume CMOS processing of photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

[17] Bowers is well known for leading research in high speed lasers, modulators and photodetectors which led to advances in fiber optic system capacities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bowers and his students, Alex Fang and Hyundai Park, solved this problem by developing heterogeneous integration of InGaAsP materials on silicon, and this process was commercialized by Intel, Juniper, and others.

[20] Bowers' most recent work involves monolithic growth of high gain materials on silicon.

He and graduate students, Rich Mirin now at NIST, developed quantum dot lasers that are robust against degradation and led to monolithic PICs.