He has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2000), Robert R. Coble Award from the American ceramics Society (2002), Corning Faculty fellowship in Ceramic Sciences (2004), National Research Council Faculty Fellowship (2004), Wilson award for excellence in research (2005), Eshbach Faculty Fellow at the Northwestern University (2007), Richard M. Fulrath award from the American ceramics Society (2009), Faculty Scholar Medal from Penn State (2012).

He is a group leader in the NSF-MRSEC Center for Nanoscale Science, has served on the editorial board of the Annual Reviews of Materials research since 2004. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2012. Gopalan has published over 200 papers, and has written five book chapters on ferroelectric complex oxides, nonlinear optics, optical metamaterials, and scanning probe microscopy.