Early this month I attended the Gordon Research Conference on Solar Fuels in Lucca, Italy. It was a great week — long days of talks, longer evenings of wine and arguments about catalysts. Among the people I met were editors from Nature Materials, Nature Catalysis, Nature Energy, Joule, and Nature Chemical Engineering. Over one of those evenings, I asked a question that has been sitting at the back of my mind for a while: how often do you see submissions from Thai institutions?

 

The answer was, essentially, almost never.

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That stuck with me. Thailand has talented scientists, well-equipped universities, and a growing community working on problems that matter — energy, water, climate, health. So why is the top tier of the literature so quiet on us? On the flight back, I tried to write down the honest answer. Here it is.

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1. Funding structure and timeline

Most Thai research grants run for one to three years and demand a clear deliverable, almost always defined as publications in high-impact journals. On paper this sounds reasonable. In practice it is the single biggest reason we don't aim for Nature or Science. As a general rule of thumb, every 15,000 USD of grant money is expected to produce one Tier-1 paper (top 10 percentile), or roughly 9,100 USD per Q1 paper.

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A Nature paper typically takes years of work and most of that work is high-risk. You might spend two years on an idea that doesn't pan out. And even after you submit, the review process at a top journal usually takes another 10 to 18 months: multiple rounds of revision, often with additional experiments demanded by reviewers. So a project that starts today might not appear in print until well after the grant has closed and the report is overdue.

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Under a three-year grant with a publication KPI, that timeline is professional suicide. The rational strategy is to slice the project into safe, incremental papers that you know you can land in a respectable journal within the funding window. The funding structure punishes ambition and rewards predictability.

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2. PDRA and PhD funding tied to short-cycle KPIs

The same problem repeats one level down. If I hire a C2F postdoc on a one-year contract, they need to publish within twelve months to get year two. If they don't, I as the PI get blacklisted — and that affects the other three C2F postdocs in my group. So everyone in the lab is optimising for a 12-month publication cycle.

You cannot do a Nature-level project on a 12-month publication cycle — not when the review process alone can eat up most of that window. The two things are incompatible. We are not lazy or unambitious; we are responding rationally to the incentives we are given.

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3. The PhD pipeline is thin

The third issue is that we don't have enough PhD students, and the reason is structural rather than cultural. Thailand has very few PhD-level jobs outside of academia. The handful of companies that hire PhDs often pay them at a Master's salary, with the vague promise of faster promotion. For a smart 22-year-old looking at the next decade of their life, the maths doesn't really work.

I talked about this with a Korean professor at a conference and he said something that has stayed with me.

Twenty years ago Korea was in the same place we are now. Today, a single Samsung HQ building houses more than 2,000 PhDs. The S-curve shifted because Korea, deliberately, built an economy that needed PhDs — and then those PhDs built the next S-curve. With the right policy choices, Thailand can do the same. I genuinely believe that.

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4. Depth of research

The fourth issue is the one I think about most, because it's the one closest to my daily work. Thai research funding overwhelmingly demands an immediate prototype or a direct economic benefit. That sounds reasonable until you realise it leaves almost no room for the kind of work where you don't yet know what the answer looks like — the work where understanding, not optimisation, is the goal.

Nature and Science papers are almost never about a 2% efficiency improvement on an existing device. They are about a new understandings, new concept that opens a door no one knew was there.

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5. The deeper issue: a culture of low trust

If you keep pulling on the thread, all four problems above lead back to the same root cause: we don't trust researchers.

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Thailand has a long history of corruption in public spending, and the natural reaction from government has been to demand the most concrete, countable KPIs possible — papers published, demo plants built, patents filed. Things that can be photographed and put in a report. If someone later questions how the money was used, the funder is safe because the deliverable is tangible.

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I understand why the system was built this way. But the side effect is that we have made it almost impossible to fund the kind of research where the deliverable, by definition, cannot be specified in advance. The very nature of a breakthrough is that you don't know what it looks like until you have it. A low-trust system cannot accommodate that, so it doesn't try. This is not something we can change easily, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

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The same culture shapes how Thai companies invest in technology. The default move is to license or buy a proven solution from abroad and adapt it locally, rather than develop our own. Again, this is rational in the short term — it's lower risk, faster to deploy, and easier to justify to a board. But it has two consequences. First, it keeps us permanently downstream of the countries that do fund risky research. Second, and more importantly for climate tech, the imported solution is often a poor fit for the Thai context.

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Take agrivoltaics — solar panels mounted above farmland so the same land produces both electricity and crops. This is a brilliant idea in Germany, where land is scarce and expensive, and where every square metre has to do double duty. In Thailand, where we have abundant flat land, retrofitting agrivoltaics is solving a problem we don't really have. We are paying a complexity premium for a constraint that doesn't apply to us.

 

Meanwhile, we are sitting on a set of resources that very few countries in the world have at the same time: strong year-round sun, abundant biomass from agriculture, plentiful water, and large tracts of land. These are exactly the ingredients you need to produce green hydrogen and green ammonia. Thailand could realistically position itself as a global exporter of renewable fuels — a Saudi Arabia of green hydrogen, if we wanted to be. The technical case is genuinely strong.

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But no Thai energy company is going to bet on this, because it would mean developing a technology stack that doesn't yet exist commercially, on a timeline that doesn't match quarterly earnings. It's too risky. So we wait for someone else — probably Australia, Japan, or the Gulf — to prove the model, and then we license it back ten years later. By then the export window may already be closed.

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What I think we should do about it

I don't have a complete answer, but I have a starting point: creativity matters more than capability.

When I look back at my own Nature Water paper on hybrid photothermal–photocatalyst sheets, what got it into that journal was not that the efficiency was record-breaking. It wasn't. What got it in was that the concept itself was new — using waste heat from a photocatalyst to drive a solar vapour generator, so the same device produces both hydrogen and clean water from seawater or wastewater. That gave the community a new direction to investigate, not just a better number on an old graph.

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I learned this from my PhD supervisor, Prof Erwin Reisner, on the day we first sat down to discuss my project. He said something I have never forgotten:

"We don't go after efficiency or incremental improvement. We explore new concepts that have the potential to change the world."

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That sentence shaped how I think about research. It is also, I believe, the answer to the question I started this article with. The reason we don't see Thai papers in Nature and Science isn't that we lack the talent or the equipment. It's that our system, from grants down to postdoc contracts, asks us to be efficient when it should be asking us to be brave — and our culture, from funders to companies, asks for certainty in a field where certainty is the one thing breakthroughs cannot offer.

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Funding agencies, universities, and senior academics — including me — have to make space for the riskier kind of research. Longer grants. Outputs measured by impact and novelty rather than journal count. Real career paths for PhDs outside the lecture hall. And companies that are willing, occasionally, to bet on a Thai-developed solution to a Thai-specific opportunity rather than importing someone else's answer to someone else's problem.

None of this is fast, but none of it is impossible either.

 

"Korea didn't get to 2,000 PhDs in one Samsung building by accident. Neither will we."