Dr Knauer is an environmental modeler interested in vegetation responses to ongoing environmental and climate change. He did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. In 2019 he moved to Canberra where he worked at the CSIRO Climate Science Centre. Since 2021 he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University. He is interested in how plant physiological processes affect the climate system and how plants respond to a changing climate themselves.