Why Thai Researchers Should Look Outside — and Why the World Should Look to Thailand
An honest look at the funding gap, the hidden value of Thai research infrastructure, and the case for a new kind of partnership.
Chanon Pornrungroj | May 2026
The uncomfortable arithmetic of Thai research funding
Let me start with a number that should bother every Thai academic.
A typical consortium-level domestic grant in Thailand — say, a PMU-B Frontier Research call — funds around 3–5 million baht per project, usually shared among five or more co-PIs across multiple institutions. After overhead, equipment, and student stipends, each PI is effectively operating with about 1 million baht for the full project period. We then expect that same team to deliver three to ten internationally indexed publications, often within three years.
For comparison, a single UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) consortium grant of the kind that funds equivalent work — three to five UK universities collaborating on, say, multiscale heat transfer or solar fuels — sits comfortably at £1.5 million, or roughly 66 million baht. That is more than ten times larger, often for fewer participating PIs, and with fewer mandated publication targets. The UK output sections of these applications, in my experience, rarely even ask how many papers you will publish.
This is not a complaint about Thai science policy. The Thai system has genuine constraints, and PMU-B has done remarkable work building a competitive research culture from a low base. But the arithmetic is what it is: if you stay only in the domestic funding ecosystem, you are competing in a pool that is structurally undersized relative to the ambitions Thai researchers now have.
Where the international door is actually open
The good news is that the international door is more open than most Thai academics realise.
There is a long list of bilateral and multilateral schemes — UKRI's various international calls (often via standard EPSRC, BBSRC, or NERC schemes with international co-investigators), the UK's International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) which specifically replaces the old Newton Fund for UK–Thai collaboration, JST–PMU-B NEXUS with Japan, NRCT–NSFC with China, the e-ASIA Joint Research Programme across East Asia, SEA–Europe JFS, the Royal Academy of Engineering's Frontiers and LIF programmes, JSPS bilateral exchanges, Shanghai STCSM's co-research fellowships. The full menu is broader than most of us are taught during our PhDs.
It is worth distinguishing two categories that often get conflated. EU/UKRI standard consortium grants are large (£1.5M+) and built around EU/UK-led research priorities, with Thai partners coming in as international co-investigators on the basis of scientific merit and complementary capability. ISPF, in contrast, is a smaller, ODA-aligned scheme designed specifically for UK–Thai partnership building — typically £80–100K on the UK side with matched PMU-B funding on the Thai side. The first gives you scale; the second gives you a low-risk on-ramp to build the relationships that lead to the first.
The strategic insight is not about applying to all of these in parallel. It is about understanding what your seat at an international consortium is actually worth.
If a UKRI consortium grant is 66 million baht and there are five PIs sharing it, your individual share — even on a junior basis — is around 13 million baht over three years. That is more than ten times what an equivalent Thai PI realistically retains from a domestic consortium grant for the same scope of work. And the application asks fewer questions about deliverables.
The hidden asset: Thai research is genuinely cheaper to do
Here is the part international partners are starting to understand, and which Thai researchers should learn to articulate clearly.
In a recent Thai e-ASIA budget, the cost composition was roughly 35% consumables, 25% travel, 20% salaries, 15% other — with overhead effectively absorbed by the host institution rather than charged to the grant. Compare that to a typical UK university breakdown on a UKRI grant: 21% equipment, 31% salaries, 21% other directly incurred, and 26% institutional overhead. UK postdoctoral salaries alone are around £8,300 per month in London, equivalent to roughly 4.4 million baht per year. A UK PhD studentship runs about £28,000 per year, around 1.2 million baht.
At Chulalongkorn, the cost structure is fundamentally different. Through the C2F programme, a PI can host four university-sponsored postdoctoral researchers and two PhD students at effectively no cost to the grant (with the institution covering half of any postdoc beyond the fourth). A typical Thai PDRA salary is about £1,200 per month, roughly one-seventh of the London equivalent. A PhD student costs about £500 per month. RA salaries sit at £630–800 per month depending on degree level.
The implication is straightforward: the same dollar of international research funding goes much further when deployed through a Thai partner. This is not exploitation — it is genuine comparative advantage rooted in cost of living, institutional subsidy (about a third of Chulalongkorn's income comes from property rents around Siam Square, not from grants), and a generation of Thai researchers trained at top global universities who chose to come home.
Why the EU, UK, and US should be looking at Thailand right now
The conventional research geography of the twentieth century placed innovation in North America, Western Europe, and Northeast Asia, with the rest of the world serving as field sites for environmental sampling or as case studies for development economics. That model is genuinely changing, and not for the reasons typically cited in funder press releases.
The first reason is intellectual saturation. The marginal cost of a new paper from the same Cambridge or Stanford laboratory has risen sharply, while the marginal insight has fallen. The most generative research collaborations now happen at boundaries — between disciplines, between methods, and between geographies. Southeast Asia is one of the last large regions where novel scientific questions sit alongside trained researchers with the capacity to engage them on equal terms.
The second reason is the structure of global challenges. Climate adaptation, food and nitrogen security, microplastic pollution, tropical health, and clean energy transition cannot be solved without partners embedded in the geographies where these issues manifest. Thailand sits at the intersection of agricultural commodity markets, rapid industrialisation, monsoonal climate vulnerability, and ASEAN regional logistics. A floating solar fuels project tested only on the Cam or the Charles is a less useful project than one also tested in the Gulf of Thailand.
The third reason is institutional. Thai universities have been quietly building research infrastructure — high-resolution mass spectrometry, electron microscopy, computational clusters, scale-up reactors, or even synchrotron facilities — that meets international standards. The bottleneck is rarely capability; it is funding scale and global visibility.
The fourth reason, which funders mention publicly, is equity, diversity, and SDG alignment. International funders increasingly need ASEAN partners to satisfy the demands of their own national strategies. The UK's ISPF, the EU's Horizon Europe widening agenda, JST's NEXUS programme — these schemes were designed in part because Western funders recognised that their research base needed external anchoring to remain globally credible.
A side note on the publication culture
There is one cultural difference worth flagging directly, because it changes the rational behaviour of researchers on both sides.
The Thai system runs on a numbers game. Funding agencies, university promotion committees, and faculty performance reviews tend to count papers — and increasingly, papers in top-percentile journals. A PI on a PMU grant typically faces explicit publication deliverables: three to ten internationally indexed papers over the project period, with growing pressure to hit Q1 or top-10% journals like those with CiteScore around 14.5 sitting at the 91st percentile in their field.
The arithmetic is now well-understood internally: as a rule of thumb, every 500,000 baht of grant money is expected to produce one Tier-1 paper, or roughly 300,000 baht per Q1 paper. A 5-million-baht consortium grant therefore comes with an implicit expectation of about ten Tier-1 papers, or slightly fewer if you also promise a prototype or a patent. And — this is the part that catches early-career researchers off-guard — whatever you promised at the application stage is what you must deliver. There is essentially no room to renegotiate. If your actual research takes you somewhere more interesting eighteen months in — toward a patentable IP route, a startup spin-off, or an industrial demonstration — none of that substitutes for the paper count you committed to. The grant report will ask for the papers.
The unspoken consequence is uncomfortable but worth stating plainly. Because the deliverables are rigid and the penalty for under-delivering is real, most applicants for government grants go in with deliberately safe projects — incremental extensions of work they have already de-risked, in journals they already know they can publish in. The system optimises for predictability rather than discovery. The result, as everyone in the room knows but few say out loud, is that we generate a steady stream of competent papers but almost no cutting-edge, S-curve-shifting innovation. The grant structure has selected against it.
The UK and European systems are increasingly impact-driven. UKRI applications, in my experience, do not include publication count as an explicit deliverable in the output section. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) — the dominant UK research assessment exercise — weights "impact case studies" at 25% of a department's score, and the underlying logic of UKRI grant evaluation has shifted in parallel. What gets asked is not "how many papers?" but "what changed in the world because of this research?" — industry uptake, policy influence, demonstrable economic or societal benefit, public engagement.
There is, of course, still pressure on individual UK PDRAs to publish — a one-year contract holder needs visible output to land the next position, and the underlying paper-economy hasn't disappeared. But at the level of grant design and reporting, the UK system asks a different question than the Thai system does, and crucially, it leaves room for the project to evolve. If your UKRI project pivots from electrocatalysis papers toward a spin-out company eighteen months in, that is a success story to be celebrated in the final report, not a deviation to be explained away.
For Thai researchers, this is a feature, not a complication. It means that the kind of research that is hardest to fund domestically — longer-arc, translational, exploratory projects without quick publication wins — is precisely the kind of research that international grants are designed to support. A floating solar fuels demonstrator in the Gulf of Thailand is a harder sell to PMU than an incremental electrocatalysis paper. To UKRI, it is exactly the kind of project they want to fund.
The asymmetry cuts both ways, and Thai researchers should learn to use it
What changes for Thai researchers
If you accept the argument above, three practical conclusions follow.
First, build international relationships before you need them. The most successful Thai applicants on international consortium grants are not the ones who responded to a call last month. They are the ones who spent two years co-authoring with a UK or German colleague, hosted them in Bangkok, visited their lab in Cambridge or Munich, and were a natural choice when a consortium call appeared. Conference handshakes are not enough. Joint papers, joint students, and joint workshops are.
Second, start with low-commitment entry routes. The Royal Academy of Engineering Frontiers programme, with its £10,000 Champions grants and £20,000 follow-on seed funding, is not large money — but it is structured precisely to seed early-stage international networks. e-ASIA's three-party joint scheme is similarly designed for new collaborators. ISPF Research Collaborations administered by the British Council fit the same purpose. Use these as scaffolding for the bigger UKRI applications later.
Third, learn to value your local research economy honestly. When an international colleague asks what your group can contribute, the answer is not just "expertise in topic X." It is also: access to Southeast Asian field conditions, lower-cost experimental iteration, trained postdocs at a fraction of European cost, and an institutional environment that absorbs overhead instead of charging it back to the grant. This is real value. Articulate it clearly. International partners want to hear it.
What changes for international researchers
If you are a UK, EU, or US researcher reading this, the case for a Thai partner is not charity, and it should not be framed as such. It is a serious strategic decision about where your next decade of research output will come from.
A meaningful Thai partnership gives you access to genuinely different experimental conditions, a different cost structure for the labour-intensive parts of your research, a different policy and industrial context for translation, and a different talent pipeline for postdoctoral hiring. It also gives you a credible footprint in the part of the world where most of the population growth, energy demand growth, and climate adaptation challenge of the twenty-first century will play out.
Concretely, a £20,000 line item in a UKRI proposal — barely enough to cover two months of a UK PDRA — translates to roughly 900,000 baht in Thailand, sufficient to run a substantial sub-project for an entire year including consumables and a research assistant. A £40,000 line item supports human development plus meaningful equipment investment. The leverage ratio is hard to ignore.
The mechanics are simpler than they look. Most Thai PIs at major institutions are reachable by email and respond within a day. Most can participate in a grant without requiring complex institutional restructuring. The Thai national research portal (NRIIS) is the single submission system for most schemes, and the institutional letter of support process at a place like Chulalongkorn takes about one-two weeks. The bureaucratic activation energy is low.
What you do need to do is engage with intellectual seriousness. The best Thai researchers are not looking to be the local data-collection arm of someone else's project. They are looking for genuine co-investigation, with shared authorship, shared intellectual leadership, and shared visibility in the resulting work.
A new kind of partnership
The opportunity in front of us, on both sides, is to build a new kind of international research relationship — one that is honest about funding asymmetries, clear-eyed about comparative advantage, and genuinely collaborative on the science. Thai researchers should stop treating international funding as out of reach. International funders and PIs should stop treating Thailand as a development case rather than a research partner.
If we get this right, the next generation of climate, energy, and sustainability breakthroughs will look different from the last. They will be co-authored by people working in Bangkok and Boston, in Cambridge and Chulalongkorn, in Munich and Mahidol. And the science will be better for it.