Chemist Dana Sanza smells a chemica

Chemist Dana Sanza smells a chemical concoction to determine if it has the right “fruity note” in her lab at FONA International in Geneva, Illinois. Credit: Jimi Allen Productions
This is one in a series on careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics made possible by support from the Northrop Grumman Foundation.

People have always looked to chemistry as a means to improve lives. Some 500 to 1,500 years ago, European chemists of the Middle Ages attempted to unlock the key to living forever. Some of these scientists, then known as alchemists, also tried to find a single cure for all diseases and a way to transform cheap metals into gold.

Today chemistry can be linked to the creation of just about every product in society — from sneakers and electronics to medicines and food flavorings. And chemistry is being used to tackle our most pressing problems, such as climate change and the increasing demand for energy to keep cars and trucks running and laptops humming.

Here are a trio of people working on such developments and a glimpse of what pulled them into such pursuits.

Tinkering with tastes

Chocolate-covered peanuts, s’mores, candy bars — let’s admit it; most people go crazy for chocolate. So imagine a job that requires you to taste chocolate flavors all day.

Chemist Dana Sanza does just that. She works for FONA International, a company that manufactures flavors out of natural and synthesized (or human-made) materials. Its products provide the sweet, spicy or other seasonings that give foods and beverages their distinguishing tastes. Sanza spends her days sampling and then tweaking flavors in an effort to create the exact tastes that her company’s clients desire.

“We eat all day,” she says. “When I graduated from college and first started working at a flavor house, I gained 15 pounds, because we screen everything before we put it into a product.”

As a girl, Sanza sometimes accompanied her dad to his job at McCormick, a company that produces seasonings and flavorings. There she was first exposed to food spices and flavor extracts (flavorings made by removing and isolating certain ingredients of a complex plant or animal product). “I was always fascinated with the flavor side of the business,” she says.

The companies that make food products often ask chemists like Sanza to recreate a specific taste. It may be a flavor that mimics one found in nature, such as chocolate from a cocoa bean. Flavor chemists, also known as flavorists, use chemistry to break the bean down into its many different chemicals and then focus on those that contribute most to the food’s characteristic flavor.

Once flavorists have identified the combination of chemicals responsible for a flavor, they can buy pure forms of those chemicals and combine them in the lab. They may then add additional chemicals (such as ethyl butyrate and acetaldehyde) to enhance aromas. The goal: to re-create the taste that the food makers seek, such as the flavor of a popular chocolate drink, perhaps using fewer ingredients than the natural product. Reproducing certain flavors — coffee, for example — can require hundreds of chemicals.

Often, companies seek to make these synthetic flavors because the original source — such as cocoa beans — may be too expensive or rare. Or the natural source materials may come from areas of the world that are politically unstable, making it too risky to harvest and difficult for food companies to reliably acquire.

“Making chocolate treats straight from real cocoa beans is expensive,” Sanza explains. One reason for this is that it takes many people to harvest cocoa beans. The beans grow in pods that are handpicked from the tree. Then the beans are removed from the pods. Some of her concoctions can make it easier for food manufacturers to make chocolate-flavored foods at a price more people can afford.

Sanza didn’t always dream of being a flavorist. She studied chemistry and biology in college because she thought she wanted to help find a cure for cancer. But somewhere along the line, Sanza became interested in food science. She found she needed analytical chemistry courses to learn how to use complex instruments that can separate a complex compound or group of them into individual chemical components.

Flavorists also participate in a seven-year-long apprenticeship to be certified by the Society of Flavor Chemists. Flavorists-in-training start out working in a flavor company, mixing together chemicals, solvents (a substance that can dissolve another substance) and other materials to create a flavor. Even as trainees, flavorists taste their projects to see if they are getting them just right. Although Sanza admits that she is a chocoholic, she says her job includes tasting many other flavors as well.

This is a great career if you are creative and drawn to science, she explains, because it is really both a science and an art. And don’t worry if math is not your favorite subject, she adds. “I am not great at math,” she notes, even though it is something that she uses every day on the job. But, she says, if it’s an essential tool for what you want to do, “you can always learn it.”

Braving desert dust

Some windstorms whip up so much dust, sand and dirt that they create a dense haze that rises high overhead. These dust clouds can be so severe that they make it hard to see your own hand in front of your face. Atreyee Bhattacharya, a recent Harvard University graduate, was so excited by these desert phenomena that she decided to study them and how they might affect weather.

Her work focuses on how warming temperatures due to climate change might interfere with rainfall patterns. As conditions dry a landscape, soil will dry out, allowing winds to fling it skyward. She is especially interested in effects on desert regions in Africa, China and the southwestern United States.