After receiving his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, Prof. Timmermann completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Royal Dutch Weather Service and a 6-month Post-Doc position at the University of Hawaii (UH). He returned to Germany for 4 years to build up a research group in paleo-climate modeling. Since August 2004, he has been a faculty member of the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) and the Department of Oceanography at UH and enjoys working in an international research environment.
In his relatively short stay with us, Prof. Timmermann has already honored our school by receiving the prestigious Rosenstiel Award in Oceanographic Science in February 2006. The last time a University of Hawaii scholar received this award was in 1981. He received the award for making a significant contribution into understanding changing climates, especially those from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Some of his most recent work involved theories of why the last ice age ended. http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/news/news.html
Prof. Timmermann teaches Numerical Modeling, Climate Modeling, and Dynamical Paleoceanography, and currently mentors two Ph.D. students and two masters candidates. When not teaching or mentoring students he is busy with research contracts through the Japanese Agency for Marine Sciences (JAMSTEC), NSF, and DOE. He studies the climate system, its response to anthropogenic factors and its past behavior. He recently became interested in the issue of ice-sheet instabilities and their influence on global sea level rise.
Prof. Timmermann's students use powerful supercomputers to model the climate system. He uses some of the resources that IPRC has in-house, but also looks to outside sources like MHPCC for some of the more challenging modeling runs focusing on ice sheet instabilities. Read more about Prof. Timmermann and his work at http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/people/timmermann.html.
