Mirin's research interests include superconducting single-photon detectors, III-V semiconductor devices including semiconductor lasers, chip-scale nonlinear optics, and quantum dots, and molecular beam epitaxy. Mirin returned to UCSB in 2025 after nearly thirty years working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he most recently served as the quantum nanophotonics group leader in the Applied Physics Division.