After a 2-years postdoctoral fellowship at the Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, Illinois), a further 5 years in academia and a 5-year career in industry, was a full professor for chemical technology and reaction engineering at Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) from 1974–1995.
Baerns was a member of numerous scientific committees and a referee for research proposal at a national level.
He received the DECHEMA titanium medal,[2] the award of the 4th World Congress on Oxidation Catalysis, for which he acted as president, honorary professorships of the Humboldt University and the Technical University, both at Berlin, honorary membership of the Leibniz-Institute for Catalysis at Rostock (Germany).
Baerns was an author of about 300 scientific publications[3] and three books on chemical reaction engineering and catalysis.
[4] Manfred Baerns, Martin Holena, Combinatorial development of solid catalytic materials - Design of high throughput experiments, data analysis, data mining, 2009, Imperial College Press, London, 178 pages