After his graduation he moved to France to work at the coherent optics group of Serge Lowenthal at the Institut d'Optique in Orsay.
[2] In 1994 Braat won the Edward Longstreth Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science of the Franklin Institute for "contributions to optical data recording and design of aspherical objective lenses for read-out systems of optical storage".
[3] Braat was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
[7] In 2019 he received the Holst Memorial Lecture Award from Eindhoven University of Technology.
[2] His main work is the 1000-page textbook Imaging Optics, which also contains contribution from second author Peter Török.