[3] In 2017, he became a Distinguished Professor at Pusan National University and the founding Director of the Institute for Basic Science Center for Climate Physics.

In December 2018, the Center began to utilize a 1.43-petaflop Cray XC50 supercomputer, named Aleph, for climate physics research.

Timmermann worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Netherlands and Hawaii before becoming a principal investigator of the DFG Research Group at the Institut fuer Meerskunde in Kiel.

In 2017, he relocated to Busan, South Korea to head up the new IBS Center for Climate Physics in Pusan University.

He has been a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in the cross-field category in 2018,[8][9] 2019,[10][11] and 2023 and also environment and ecology in 2020 and 2021.