[7] In 1988, he briefly did research at Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and the Space Telescope Science Institute before accepting a tenured professorship at Rice University in the space, physics, and astronomy department.

[11][12] In 2009, he co-founded the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), a collaborative group of physicists, electrical engineers, mathematicians, and chemists.

[21] In 2021, he was awarded the Walter Boas Medal by the AIP and granted a visiting professor fellowship at École normale supérieure in Paris.

[21] In 2022, he was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Aix-Marseille and honoured by Anti-slavery Australia for his collaborative work on novel ways to track modern slavery in supply chains.

[25][26][27][28] The Annual Review paper additionally introduces galactic archaeology, chemical tagging, and the use of high spectroscopic resolution to conduct mass star surveys.

[25][29][30][9] This technology has been in use since 1993 and still plays a large part in surveys such as the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), Gaia-ESO (GES), Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), the William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE), and 4MOST, as well as the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) with which he is involved.

[31][32][33][34][35][36] In 2011, Bland-Hawthorn, Sanjib Sharma, Kathryn Johnston, and James Binney developed Galaxia, a galaxy model simulation code.

[54][55][56] He and colleagues John Bartholomew and Matt Sellars proposed that quantum memories at different telescopes can be combined to perform very-long-baseline interferometry at infrared wavelengths.