[1] After a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty at Michigan State University in 1988.

He has worked on a large variety of topics in computational physics, from high-temperature superconductivity to supernova explosions, but has been especially interested in relativistic nuclear collisions.

They obtained NSF funding to develop novel teaching and laboratory techniques, and authored multimedia physics CDs for their students at MSU's Lyman Briggs School.

In subsequent years, they were instrumental in creating the LearningOnline Network with CAPA (LON-CAPA), which is now used at more than 70 universities and colleges in the United States and around the world.

Since 2008, Bauer and Westfall have been part of a team of instructors, engineers, and physicists, who investigate the use of peer-assisted learning in the introductory physics curriculum.

This project has received funding from the NSF STEM Talent Expansion Program, and its best practices have been incorporated into their textbook "University Physics", which was published in 2010 by McGraw-Hill, and which has also been translated into Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish languages.