His awards include the Norman Medal in 1999 and the Theodore von Kármán Prize in 2002, both from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award, which was established in 2008, is named after him.
Later, he moved to the United States as a Fulbright scholar and attended Cornell University, where he earned an MS Mechanical Engineering in 1952.
[6] Caughey started his career as an instructor at Caltech in 1953 and later served as a professor of applied mathematics and mechanical engineering between 1955 and 1996.
[8] He worked with fellow professor Donald E. Hudson to develop the C. I. T. MARK II Response Spectrum Analyzer, which was displayed at the Second World conference on Earthquake Engineering in Tokyo in 1960.