During his postgraduate study he was a student of Jesus College, Oxford, and supervised by John Francis Ryan, where his doctoral research investigated nonlinear optics in semiconductors.

[citation needed] Following his PhD, Baumberg was a visiting IBM Research fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) from 1994 to 1995.

[citation needed] He returned to the UK to work in the Hitachi Cambridge Lab[1] from 1995 to 1998 before being appointed professor of nano-scale physics at the University of Southampton[citation needed] from 1998 to 2007 where he co-founded Mesophotonics Limited, a Southampton University spin-off company.

[citation needed] Baumberg's research is in nanotechnology,[2] including nanophotonics, plasmonics, metamaterials and optical microcavities.

He is interested in the development of nanostructured optical materials that undergo unusual interactions with light, and his research has various commercial applications.