Univ.-Prof. Dr. DDr.h.c. Rudolf Bauer graduated as a pharmacist at the University of Munich, Germany, obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1984, and habilitated in 1990 in pharmaceutical biology. He worked at this university as a scientific assistant until 1993, and then he went to the University of Düsseldorf, where he gained a university professorship. Later he achieved a full professorship in 2002 and was the head of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences University of Graz (Austria) for many years. He is currently head of the Department of Pharmacognosy of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In addition, Professor Bauer is working as the Chairman of the TCM Working Group of the European Pharmacopoeia Commission and is the head of the TCM Research Center, Herbal Medicine Research, Graz. From 2023, he is a Chairman of the Expert Group 13A of the European Pharmacopoeia Commission.

His main research fields are quality control and standardization of herbal drugs and herbal medicinal products, including Chinese herbal drugs, isolation and structure elucidation of biologically active plant constituents, pharmacological screening, and pharmacokinetic studies of plant constituents, plant metabolomics-based drug discovery, interactions of herbal medicinal products with gut microbiota. He has authored c.a. 410 scientific papers and 6 patents, the number of independent citations is over 10.000, and his h-index is 66. He has supervised so far 34 Ph.D. theses. Many research grants and different international projects marked his activities. He is a holder of the Egon-Stahl-Award (1990), Norman R. Farnsworth Excellence in Botanical Research Award (2010), and Varro E. Tyler Award (2019). He is an honorary Guest Professor of 5 Chinese universities and has an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Helsinki (Finland) and of the University of Szeged, Hungary.