Govind Agrawal is currently James C. Wyant Professor of Optics at the Institute of Optics of University of Rochester. He is an author or co-author of more than 450 research papers and eight books. His books on Nonlinear Fiber Optics and Fiber-Optic Communication Systems are used worldwide for research and teaching. Since 2014, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Advances in Optics and Photonics. Prof. Agrawal is a Fellow of both IEEE and the Society. In 2012, IEEE Photonics Society honored him with its Quantum Electronics Award. He is also the recipient of 2015 Esther Hoffman Beller Medal and the 2019 Max Born Award.

Agrawal's research interests have varied over a wide range over the last 40 years. During his time at Bell Laboratories, he made numerous contributions to the field of semiconductor lasers and co-authored a book on this topic in 1986 with N. K. Dutta. In 1989, Agrawal published his second book Nonlinear Fiber Optics which has proven to be a classic, has undergone five editions, and has been cited more than 23,000 times. After 2005, Agrawal's interests shifted to a new area known as silicon photonics. In 2007, he published a review on this topic in “Optics Express” that has been cited close to 800 times. More recently he has been publishing in the areas of space-time duality and multimode nonlinear optics.