He has proposed and pioneered the use of silk as a material platform for advanced technology with uses in photonics, optoelectronics, and nanotechnology applications. He is co-inventor on a number of disclosures on the subject, and is actively investigating applications of this technology base for both technical and design applications. Omenetto was formerly a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratories and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the American Physical Society. In 2010, Fortune magazine named him one of its 50 smartest people in tech.