Dawson was awarded the 2016 Aron Kessel Award by the IEEE Photonics Society “for broad and sustained contributions to semiconductor opto-electronic engineering, including optically-pumped semiconductor lasers, diamond photonics and galliumnitride microdevices." He became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2000, a Fellow of the OSA in 2006, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007, and Fellow of IEEE in 2009.