In his work at Caltech and Stanford, Safavi-Naeini developed optomechanical devices resulting in some of the first experiments showing quantum optomechanical phenomena. The current focus of his group's research is developing photonic, phononic, and microwave devices for quantum sensing, communications, and information processing. He is the author of more than 50 journal papers and co-inventor on 5 US patents/applications. He has been awarded the Terman (2015, 2018), Hellman (2016), Packard (2017) fellowships, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2019).