Tosaporn Sattasathuchana
Tosaporn Sattasathuchana was born and raised in Thailand. She has won a full scholarship since high school. During that time, she participated in the 1st Thailand Chemistry Olympiad. After receiving her B.Sc. from Mahidol University, Thailand, she was awarded the Swiss Confederation scholarship program for MSc studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She earned Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from the University of Zurich under supervision of Prof. Kim Baldridge. As the Baldridge group moved to Tianjin University, China, she gained invaluable experiences from Europe to East Asia. To further her knowledge in quantum mechanics, she joined the Gordon research group at Iowa State University in 2017 as a postdoctoral research associate and became a scientist at Ames National Laboratory in 2021. Tosaporn joined the UHM Chemistry Department in August 2024.
Her research uses quantum chemical (QC)-based approaches to a) understand principles governing complex phenomena in nature and b) advance the discovery of smart materials to address challenges in climate, energy, and health. Her contributions are to the development of highly scalable QC methods to investigate solvent effects in chemical reactions, describe intermolecular interactions, and predict protein-ligand binding free energy. Students in her group will learn a range of skills, from developing new computational tools and critically solving scientific problems to designing unique algorithms and using techniques in high-performance computing.