Win - Carbon Capture & Storage Technology - Thailand
What three things do you do differently after your program at the East-West Center (SUSI/YSEALI)?
I have been learned three important lessons.
1. “I am not only Thai but also own the global citizenship”
During undergraduate study (2007 - 2011), Bangkok was flooded by banners of the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) which meant to offer opportunities in the form of a huge market among 10 south-east Asia countries. The mainstream policy of the universities in Thailand was about to produce young professionals to strengthen the country. “Collaboration” is such a beautiful word which always had been used to entertain undergraduate students. Technically, everyone realized that AEC was the great competition in future.
After participated in SUSI 2011, I joined master degree program in Department of Chemical Technology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. The most difficult decision was dissertation topic which could affect my future carrier. To survive in AEC era, my research topic could be anything but not involve with environmental issues. I had learned from SUSI was that passion should put in the priority before taking an action. No doubt, my passion was global warming crisis. This topic did not fit with the preparation of the country for AEC but it was a foundation for solving our crisis in global scale. Thus, I made decision to study carbon dioxide sorption as my thesis. It is 6 years since SUSI. I still work on the carbon capture and storage technology. I like my job not only it can sustain my life style but also the more I work, the more global sustainability has been improve.
2. “Leader is not the person who is the smartest”
As an introvert person, I think leader was a role which should be play by an extrovert person. SUSI and the re-union workshop in Singapore re-defined the leadership concept. The impactful leader is just a normal person who can set their goal. The good leader begins with the end in mind. This meant to me a lot. I realized that leadership is not a personality but skill. The leadership is a complete sustainable tool to solve any kind of problems. Thus, Practicing leadership is not a mere choice but must for now a day.
3. “Non-zero sum game”
Lose-Win game is a common game for me. In contrast of the sense a good leader being is about learning the way to think Win-Win. When I was an undergraduate student, I ran a small club which provided a free education for the hill tribe who live in the northern Thailand. My project proposal had been rejected frequently. After joined SUSI, the project proposal based on Win-Win concept lead me to a sponsorship to run several projects for 2 years and a huge fund to run another educational social enterprise project for 3 years.
What impact did the program have on your career?
I have two different final goals in my life. The highest goal of the first carrier path is to be a scientist who commercialized CO2 sorption unit and add value to CO2 rather than emit it into the atmosphere. The short mile stone in the next 3 years is to be a researcher in Department of Chemical Technology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University. I am going to patent an alternative for a continuous CO2 sorption unit using fluidized bed reactor. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOUOCx2Hw4k)
Education and those opportunities to participated in the international workshops especially SUSI had been transformed my life. Thus, another goal in my future carrier is to be an educator who provide an educational tool to support science and mathematics teacher who work very hard around the country.
What issues are you most passionate about in your daily life?
In developing countries, where teachers still use outdated teaching styles and materials. It is even worse when the population increase leads to a student-teacher ratio of 50:1 per class, leaving schoolteachers to handle heavy burdens and, at the same time, lack of modern instructional media. These factors have placed academic achievement in developing countries at the bottom of international rankings.
Sending children to tutorial schools is no longer a mere choice, but a must for modern parents. In Thailand, there are 1.4 million high-school students. About 500,000 students, or 35% of them, attend tutorial schools, and their parents are paying 70 Bath/day (2 USD/day) for their tutorials, while the minimum wage is 300 Bath/day (8.5 USD/day). This means that students from poor families will end up having problems in their education and children with poor education tend to have limited opportunity for their future family. At last the circle, which continuous to put further strains on socio-economic issue that developing countries face.
I was a child from a grass root family led by a single mother in the country side of Thailand. I should have been working in a small factory, like most people who had been to the same school I studied. However, due to my ambition, now I am preparing for my Ph.d defense on an alternative design of the reactor for CO2 sorption at Chulalongkorn university, Bangkgok in end of May 2017. The education transformed my life and my family. This is the reason for my passion in education. I believe that it can help people who suffered from poverty.
countries face.
How have you come to see leadership?
I gathered a group of young professionals who believe in the power of education. We believe that it can change condition of people. Therefore, good education should be a basic element that everyone can access equally. Thus, we came up with WinPhysics.Com to spread educational opportunities across Thailand.
We creatively created WinPhysics.Com as a tool to help high-school teachers with their Physics lessons. The essential parts of the website is Academy where students can learn Physics through videos in which the lessons are based on international curriculums such as IB, AP, IGCSE, A-level, OCR A, OCR B and SAT.
WinPhysics’s Academy is the first step of the project. We provide videos in each topic which students can use to solve problems in physics that come in a form of an online game, titled as ‘Crystal Hunt’. This strategy makes learning fun, and it surely creates positive feelings among students towards Physics.
The website is also designed to lessen the teachers’ burdens, since it provides in-depth information of each student together with overall result of each school calculated score on the performance Crystal Hunt. This will reduce an amount of time that teachers spend to prepare for their lessons. Instead, it will give them more time to actively coach their students.
At the first phase of my work there are a lot of the room for the improvements. The channel has only 565 subscribers and 44,218 viewers. The member on the website is about 2000 members. This number is not close enough to generate avenues from the advertisements. Thus, I considered tooking a break WinPhysics.Com for a while and tried hard to analyses the root of the problems. I did not become successful as I expect. Thus, I am looking for tools to shape my project to become a fruitful social enterprise, which creates the new paradigm on both social and business section. I think my purpose synchronizes with Collective Global Accelerator 2017 objectives to provide the tools to generate money sustainably not unlike a short incubation program which tempts participants by giving fund at the end of the event.