Timon Idema works at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at TU Delft as an associate professor of physics. He is the program director of the MSc Nanobiology and teaches several courses in biophysics, quantum mechanics, mechanics, and general relativity. He also received the Teacher of the Year award in 2019 and the J.B. Westerdijkprize for excellence in education in 2020.

He completed his PhD in theoretical biophysics at Leiden University. After that, he moved to the USA for his postdoctoral research on the mechanics of developing biological systems at the University of Pennsylvania.

Presently, Timon Idema is leading a research group in theoretical biophysics, which is part of the Department of Bionanoscience at Delft University of Technology. Using mathematical models and simulations, he investigates complex structures in biology on both small scales, such as proteins, and large scales, like macroscopic behavior of populations.