Paola Prada-Tiedemann on dogs, chemistry and national security.
Welcome to Rise & Research, where cutting-edge discoveries are made as accessible as your morning coffee. This monthly feature offers a closer look at the transformative research happening on our campus. Pull up a chair as we talk with faculty who are pushing boundaries while creating opportunities for the next generation.
In this installment, Lucy Greenberg sits down with Paola Prada-Tiedemann to discuss how dogs and chemistry are a winning pair when it comes to national security.
The 10-mile drive from Texas Tech University’s main campus to the Reese National Security Complex is dotted with dazzling historic homes, sprawling local parks, cranberry-colored crape myrtles blooming on the edge of town and finally, open country road.
The stately entrance to the national security complex is impossible to miss amid the cotton fields.
The Institute for Forensic Sciences within the Department of Environmental Toxicology – the home to Paola Prada-Tiedemann’s office and laboratories – emerges around a few turns. I’ve agreed to meet her to see how she’s using chemistry to better train canine units serving in law enforcement.
I’m interested in talking to Prada-Tiedemann about detection dogs’ sense of smell and how she recreates those odors in her lab.
“Everything around us gives off odor; we just don’t see it,” Prada-Tiedemann says. “The work I do is like being a detective, but instead of using visual clues or my eyes, I’m using smelly, invisible clues.”
For everything I’ve seen this morning, it’s the first moment I’ve slowed down enough to smell my surroundings. I’d blown past the coffee shop without registering the roasted beans. My car’s new air freshener faded into my morning routine as if it had always been there. Only now, as we walk into the building and the sprinklers kick on and water grazes my ankles, does the smell of fresh-cut grass reach me.
Apparently, I have a lot to learn, not only from Prada-Tiedemann, but perhaps the dogs, too.
Q: How would you explain your research simply?
A: I work with detection dogs because I’m trying to understand exactly what it is a dog is smelling when it alerts. Their sense of smell is to them what vision is to us. We walk into a room and use our eyes to scan for people or objects; a dog experiences the world primarily through scent.
Every object emits its own set of tiny chemicals, which is why dogs can be trained to detect almost anything – in national security or forensics, that “anything” happens to be something of investigative or safety value, and those are the samples I analyze in the lab. My lab uses scientific instruments to extract and identify the tiny molecules that make up a smell – the same way you smell that “new toy” scent from packaging, or the popcorn as you walk into a movie theater.
Q: Just to clarify — you’re not training the dogs yourself; you’re focused on the underlying chemistry?
A: Right. I call myself “the crazy chemist in the canine world.” I collaborate with colleagues locally, nationally and internationally to compare field responses with how those samples behave in the lab. A lot of my work centers on how odor changes over time – the same way a new car or new toy eventually stops smelling new, due to degradation of the materials.
That matters because a detection dog must perform consistently regardless of temperature, weather, packaging or concealment. Drugs and explosives are rarely presented in plain view. They're wrapped, concealed, sometimes stored for years. It’s not enough to know what a bomb or a drug smells like; you need to know what it smells like under dozens of different real-world conditions.
Q: What drew you to this work?
A: I’ve loved chemistry since high school. I was one of only two girls in my AP Chemistry class. My teacher was the one who told me I had a real affinity for it and should pursue it in college; he was right.
In my third and fourth years at Florida International University I needed an undergraduate research placement. I wanted organic drug-development work, but none of those professors had lab space. I ended up with Kenneth Furton, who worked in forensic science and applied it to canine detection.
I didn’t initially see the chemistry connection, but he gave me a full independent project, and I became the first honors thesis student in the university’s chemistry department – and because of it – published from that work.
That experience hooked me. I went on to do my Ph.D. and postdoctoral work in the same area, then spent time in government, and eventually built this research program at Texas Tech.
Q: You mentioned being one of only two girls in that high school class. How did you hold onto your interests, and how do you instill that in your own students now?
A: I tell students chemistry has a reputation – people hear the word and run. I struggled with it too. But I remind them that most of the difficulty isn’t that the material is impossible, it’s that it’s unfamiliar, and we naturally fear the unknown.
The more reps you put in, the less intimidating it becomes. I also try to connect the classroom material to real impact – for example, colleagues of mine with canine teams were recently deployed to help after the earthquake in Colombia. When you see a dog locate a victim on the news, that’s chemistry at work. What feels tedious in the lab translates into something that saves lives.
Q: What drew you to academia, specifically Texas Tech?
A: After working in government for a while, I missed working with students and I missed pure research. Government work is mission-driven, with little room for “what if” exploratory questions. Colleagues told me about an opening at Texas Tech, and the fact that forensic science wasn’t yet an established program here was the draw. I got to build it from the ground up: writing the curriculum, building the classes.
Coming to Texas Tech taught me the fundamentals of higher education program-building. Since then, we’ve added new concentrations and this year, we launched Texas Tech’s first bachelor’s degree in forensic science, plus an online forensic professional concentration for working professionals. That growth is what keeps me here.
Q: Tell me about a current research project you’re working on.
A: 3D-printed firearms are an emerging national security threat, especially since the “Liberator” – the first fully 3D-printed firearm – showed people could print a functional weapon, ammunition or magazine at home with an inexpensive printer. Beyond the canine-detection problem, it’s also a ballistics problem: printed guns have no serial number, and because the material is polymer rather than metal, the barrel doesn’t leave the same striations, so traditional microscopic comparison in a crime lab doesn’t work the same way; these weapons are much harder to trace.
With John Carell from the Honors College, who advises on the printing and polymer side, we’re building a database of what different printed components – barrel, magazine, full weapon, not shot versus shot – smell like. The eventual goal is to partner with government agencies and their detection dogs to test whether a dog trained on traditional firearms will alert on a 3D-printed one.
Q: What can students expect from working in your lab?
A: I love student mentoring. Classes matter, but hands-on exposure teaches you things a classroom can’t. I bring students to the forefront of my canine trainings by running assessments and writing reports because that’s the multitasking skill set they’ll need after graduation.
I’ve had undergraduates continue as master’s students because they got hooked the same way I did. I include them in real decision-making on projects, let them attend standards meetings, bring them to trainings where they meet working officers and start networking, and push them to present at conferences even though public speaking is often the hardest part for people in this field.
Since we also train forensic professionals for court testimony, I make sure students learn to explain complex science in plain language — nobody on a jury understands “GC-MS mass spectral range,” but everyone understands “the smaller molecules move faster than the bulkier ones.” I also bring my students to local schools. Ramirez Elementary invites us to their science night every year where my graduate students run demos like fingerprinting for kids and practice explaining their work in the simplest possible terms.
About Paola Prada-Tiedemann
Degrees: B.S. Florida International University, 2005; Ph.D. Florida International University, 2010.
Follow her work on LinkedIn.