Credit:
Courtesy of Jake Remacle
Jake Remacle, an R&D and technology service and development technologist at Dow, is the recipient of the 2026 ACS National Chemical Technical Professional Award. It honors excellence and professionalism among technicians, operators, and other applied chemical technical professionals (CTPs).
The award is administered by the ACS Committee on Chemical Technical Professionals. “Chemical technical professionals are the backbone of innovation in laboratories and manufacturing,” says Daniel Fonseca, chair of the committee. The award recognizes “their technical achievements, leadership, mentoring, communication skills, and contributions to quality and safety,” he says.
Remacle received the award during a luncheon at ACS Spring 2026 in Atlanta. He recently sat down with C&EN reporter Sara Cottle to share more about his work as a CTP. His responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What drew you to R&D?
When I first got out of school, I interviewed at a couple of different places. One job was at a plant that made string cheese and one was in R&D at a pharmaceutical company. I was excited about the research and development part because it changes every day. Every day you come into something different that can be good or bad, but to me that’s exciting. And that’s really one of the reasons why I’ve spent my entire career in research and development.
What does a typical day in the lab look like for you?
The days depend on the status of the projects and where we are at. Some days can be quite hectic if we’re troubleshooting a plant process. So, in research and development, we have a lot of tools that manufacturing doesn’t necessarily have. And so some days we spend a lot of time seeing what went wrong in the plant. It’s really hard to say what a typical day is. I interact in the labs daily. I also do a lot of work on my computer and spreadsheets trying to sort out what the data is telling me. Each day is different, but on a daily basis I run reactions, I do analysis, I try to draw conclusions of either what we want to see or what we hope to see and maybe what we’re not seeing.
What type of roles can CTPs have at Dow?
I’ll preempt this with I’m not in human resources. I know a few roles, but I do know that chemical technical professionals operate in Dow in analytical labs for research and development; quality labs for manufacturing; and they work in technical service and development, where they test physical properties of materials for interaction with customers. There’s CTPs that operate in manufacturing and that are experts at specific manufacturing processes. And then there’s CTPs that do even earlier research and development to develop the next materials that Dow wants to commercialize. So, there are a lot of different roles that have a lot of different aspects to them, depending on what a person is interested in.
Could you share details of a particularly memorable project or contribution?
The memorable ones to me are the difficult ones, where there’s not a straightforward answer. A lot of times in my role I do something on a smaller scale and we transfer that to manufacturing. And it seems like whenever we transfer to manufacturing, we learn something. There’s a lot of memories in that. And one of the things that I keep in mind all the time is that you’re probably going to learn something every day and keep those learnings because they’re probably applicable to the next projects. It seems like every day we’re learning something new. The ones that we don’t understand initially—those are memorable because we have to continually do research to understand why things don’t work.
What is your favorite part about your job?
I enjoy working with others. It’s really valuable, and I get a lot of value out of seeing others succeed when we implement something that helps them. If we develop a lab analytical technique that can be transferred to multiple projects, I feel really good about that—that we help somebody save a lot of time on their project. And especially with equipment-related tasks, something runs smoother in the lab. And then the mentoring aspect too.
What item in the lab can you not live without?
Anymore, it’s the computer. I’ve really seen since when I first started, we used to have paper lab notebooks, and we would write everything. We’ve transitioned now to fully computerized lab notebooks and operate equipment remotely using my computer. I enter all my data into my notebook using my computer, so I really cannot live without it. There’s a lot of other things in the lab, that you have to have that work, but unfortunately, I can’t do anything without the computer.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about being a CTP? When I started this journey—I actually started 28 years ago . . . but, you know . . . I did not expect to see all the rewards that can come from this job. You get to meet a lot of different people. You get to interact with different management techniques, and you get to really come together as a team to develop better chemical processes. And that’s something I did not expect when I started this job. I guess when you start a role and you’re fresh out of college, you don’t really know what to expect. So, I find that very rewarding and that makes the time really go by fast because it really does not seem like I’ve been in this role this long.
More information about the award, deadline, and how to apply can be found on the ACS website.
