Pimjai Pimbaotham stands in front of a scientific poster illustrating her work during a visiting research fellowship at UBC Okanagan.
Pimjai Pimbaotham was not looking for the origins of life.
At Ubon Ratchathani University in her native Thailand, she studied catalysis, or the science of speeding up chemical reactions.
When she arrived at UBC Okanagan in 2024 on a visiting research fellowship, she was handed a project examining how the building blocks of life might’ve assembled four billion years ago. She found it disorienting.
“It was difficult for me to see the bigger picture,” Pimbaotham says.
What helped was a movie.
“One of my favourite movies is The Martian,” she says. “The story follows an astronaut on Mars who studies the environment and soil of the planet while trying to survive. Even though it’s fictional, it made me think about the possibility of life beyond Earth and whether life could have started somewhere else in the universe.”
Two years later, Pimbaotham is first author on a paper that reached the cover of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, one of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s flagship journals..
Chemistry before biology
An artist’s rendering of the chemistry at the heart of Pimbaotham’s paper, which was featured on the cover of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.
The question the paper takes on is deceptively simple: how did life’s molecules stick together?
Proteins are the machinery of living things. They’re chains of amino acids linked by peptide bonds. Before there was any biology to do the assembling, those bonds had to form on their own, somewhere on a lifeless, hostile planet Earth.
Working with Dr. Robert Szilagyi, a computational chemist with UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, Pimbaotham mapped how two of the simplest amino acids join up and curl around to bite their own tails, forming rings—not in a lab, but on a computer simulating where every atom and electron sits at each instant of the reaction.
“Computational chemistry helps us understand what happens at the molecular level,” she says. “It allows us to investigate whether certain chemical reactions could have taken place on Earth before life existed.”
The team tested how the reaction behaves under conditions that would have been common on our younger planet: varying acidity levels, crushing pressure and heat. What set their approach apart was treating hydrogen atoms as quantum clouds capable of tunnelling through barriers that classical chemistry says should stop them.
The work does more than satisfy curiosity. It could also point toward cheaper ways to build complex molecules using abundant, low-cost ingredients. The team is now testing whether common materials like mineral surfaces and metal-bearing rocks could act as natural workbenches for these reactions, potentially opening new routes to manufacturing valuable chemicals and biological molecules.
Passing it forward
Pimjai Pimbaotham (centre) poses with academic supervisors Drs. Siriporn Jungsuttiwong and Robert Szilagyi.
In Dr. Szilagyi’s lab, Pimbaotham found herself in another unique position, as mentor. She worked with UBCO undergraduate John K. Villanueva, who built and benchmarked part of a quantum chemistry code developed by Dr. Masanori Tachikawa at Yokohama City University in Japan. It was Dr. Tachikawa who also helped facilitate Pimbaotham’s time in Canada.
“Working with John was one of the best parts of my time in Canada,” Pimbaotham says. “One of my favourite moments was watching him present his research poster. I was proud to see how much he had improved and how confident he had become. Seeing someone grow through research is one of the best parts of being a mentor.”
The timing of Pimbaotham’s visit and the remarkable research progress led to presentations at UBC Okanagan, the Western Canadian Undergraduate Chemistry Conference and the Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition in Ottawa, alongside graduate and undergraduate students from the Szilagyi lab. The work was named Outstanding Graduate Research Award at the PhD level during Ubon Ratchathani University’s Science Week in Thailand.
It began at a science exchange she didn’t even attend. In 2024, her thesis advisor, Dr. Siriporn Jungsuttiwong, took part in the Sakura Science Program in Japan, hosted by Dr. Tachikawa. Among the researchers she met there was Dr. Szilagyi.
Dr. Jungsuttiwong hoped Pimbaotham could do a research exchange in Canada, but the cost of a year abroad was beyond her funding. Dr. Szilagyi pointed to the Canada-ASEAN Scholarships and Educational Exchanges for Development program, designed for students from Southeast Asia.
It was a conversation between Pimbaotham, her supervisors at UBCO and in Thailand, and Dr. Tachikawa that led to the research breakthrough.
Opening doors for researchers
The Visiting International Research Student (VIRS) program enabled Pimbaotham to conduct research full-time at UBC Okanagan.
The Visiting International Research Student (VIRS) program enabled Pimbaotham to conduct research full-time. The program welcomes undergraduate, graduate and graduate-equivalent students from universities around the world, as well as participants in UBC-recognized bridging programs like DAAD Rise Worldwide and Mitacs Globalink.
“VIRS has been part of how UBC brings students and researchers together for a number of years now, on our Okanagan and Vancouver campuses,” says Dr. Philipp Reichert, Director of the Global Engagement Office. “It creates opportunities for talented students to contribute to meaningful research while enabling our faculty to collaborate with emerging researchers from around the world.”
Through VIRS, students undertake full-time research under the supervision of a UBC faculty member while remaining enrolled at their home institution. There is no requirement to enrol in UBC coursework or pursue a UBC degree.
“What’s great about VIRS is how often it’s just the beginning,” says Dr. Dana Lowton, Assistant Director of the UBCO Go Global program. “Students come for a research placement, but the connections they build don’t end when they return to their home institutions. Those research relationships often continue for years, and we regularly see former VIRS participants return to UBC to pursue graduate degrees.”
Learn more through the UBC Okanagan Global Engagement Office.
