Tanya Fry wins 2025 ACS National Chemical Technician Award

Tanya Fry, a sensory science leader at Dow’s Texas Innovation Center is the recipient of the American Chemical Society’s 2025 National Chemical Technician Award. This award honors excellence and professionalism among technicians, operators, analysts, and other applied chemical technology professionals (CTPs).

Fry joined Dow Chemical’s packaging and specialty plastics business in 1988, while she was studying for an associate’s degree in chemical technology at Brazosport College. “I started out as a co-op student doing physical testing,” she says. Soon after graduating, she moved to the business’s sensory science lab. “I’ve been working in sensory science for 35 years,” Fry says. Her responsibilities include running the sensory science lab and championing the role of technicians within Dow as chair of the Texas Operations Influential Leader Network.

Since 1996, Fry has also been helping set global standards for sensory science as a member of the ASTM Committee E18 on Sensory Evaluation. She is currently the technical contact for all the packaging documents and has authored or coauthored 13 ASTM documents.

The National Chemical Technician Award is administered by the ACS Committee on Chemical Technical Professionals. “This award shines a spotlight on the invaluable contributions that CTPs make to the field of chemistry,” says Daniel Fonseca, chair of the committee. “Their technical proficiency, problem-solving abilities, and meticulous attention to detail are essential in driving innovation and ensuring the success of various projects and research endeavors.”

Fry received her award during a luncheon at ACS Spring 2025 in San Diego; C&EN had spoken to her via Zoom in February, before the event. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What is sensory science and how does it relate to Dow resins?

Dow customers convert our resins into products such as film for food and drink packaging, material for diapers, and artificial leather for the automotive industry. Sensory science is using humans as instruments to tell us about the consumer experience of our resins in the final products. All the five senses are considered: taste, odor, visual, auditory, and touch.

How do you quantify the sensory experience of your resins?

We use a sensory panel of in-house volunteers. These are all supertasters and are trained by us. For resins used for food and drink packaging, we typically use water as the medium. These resins are soaked in water, and a panel of 24 volunteers taste and smell that water. The lab environment meets ASTM standards for sensory analysis; there are 12 booths to avoid volunteers biasing each other. It’s a quiet environment, and we have carbon filters so there’s no smell in the lab.

What is the role of CTPs in your sensory lab?

The technician role is to set up experiments and ensure the samples are prepared and labeled correctly. There are three technicians in our lab. In my role as lab lead, I also talk with our internal customers and the external customers that buy our resin to determine their objectives for the experiments.

Are there any plastic types that are particularly challenging?

For food and drink, we want the plastic to contribute as little taste and smell as possible. When putting postconsumer recycled plastic back into the packaging, sensory science becomes very important. Postconsumer recycled plastic can smell pretty bad. Dow is working on ways to mitigate that, and we’ve been supporting the development team with sensory analysis to see what consumers would think about its changes.

Could you share details of a particularly memorable project?

It was a hand-feel project for sustainable trash bags. We wanted to design 20% thinner films that felt the same as the original so that consumers wouldn’t assume the thin bags were weaker. Our sensory panel could feel the difference with the first thin film, so it was redesigned to have a higher bending modulus. The next hand-feel evaluation determined that the thinner film felt the same as the original, thicker film. This project was a great example of how sensory science delivers customer solutions.

Could you tell us more about the Texas Operations Influential Leader Network?

We help Dow technicians with career development. This includes running mock interviews and supporting them with writing employee development plans. We’ve also held a career road show to demonstrate what is entailed in various technician jobs. This helps technicians know if they’d like to apply for internal job vacancies when announced.

What is it about Dow that has kept you there for 37 years so far?

I love my job. There are so many different aspects of sensory science. There is the science, the psychology (human behavior fascinates me), and the statistics that give the field its credibility. I also get to interact with people each day when conducting the panel sessions, go into the lab to prepare samples, and sit at my desk doing math and writing reports. I’m never bored.

What item in the lab can you not live without?

An electronic label maker. When I first started, I had to handwrite three-digit codes on all the cups and jars. It was hundreds per evaluation. Now I can just print the labels and stick them on. I couldn’t go back to handwriting labels.

The deadline for submissions for the 2026 ACS National Chemical Technician Award is Sept. 30.

Nina Notman is a freelance writer based in Salisbury, England.