Nico Bauer prepared his PhD-thesis guided by Ottmar Edenhofer. He returned to PIK in May 2007 after working at Fondazione ENI Enrico Mattei (FEEM), Italy, in the Climate Change Modelling and Policy programme and Paul-Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland, in the Energy Economics Modelling (EEM) group. He is engaged in the development of modelling tools for research domain III.

Nico Bauer is responsible for the research group on Energy Resources and Technology and the group on Growth and Development (with Marian Leimbach). Both are part of the integrated assessment cluster in RD3. He is engaged in a number of scientific projects and contributes to policy relevant reports. He guides PhD students with major responsibility.

He is currently co-leading the EMF-33 study on bioenergy, land-use and climate change mitigation.