Gaeta joined the faculty in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at
Cornell University in 1992. He served as its director from 2011 to 2014 and was named the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering in 2013. He also served as the director of the National Science Foundation Center of Nanoscale Systems in Information Technologies from 2008 to 2012. In 2015, he joined the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at
Columbia University where he is the David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics and Material Science. In 2011, he co-founded Picoluz, Inc. and in 2022 he co-founded Xscape Photonics. He was the founding editor-in-chief of
Optica, the flagship journal of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). Gaeta has published more than 260 journal papers in various areas of optical physics and photonics. His group performed fundamental studies on propagation of ultrashort laser pulses and slow light. He also pioneered nonlinear optics in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, and his group also demonstrated various aspects of ultrafast optical time-lens technology including its application to temporal cloaking. In collaboration with
Michal Lipson's group, his group performed many of the key demonstrations in nonlinear silicon photonics including dispersion engineering and parametric gain, generation of correlated photons, Kerr comb generation in microresonators, and supercontinuum generation. == Honors and awards ==