Turner Alfrey, Jr. was a noted teacher and research, who in more than thirty years at Dow Chemical Company as a research chemist explored a wide variety of chemical problems including polymerization kinetics, organic polymer chemistry, reactions on polymers, swelling and diffusion behavior, colloid chemistry, mechanics, property-structure relationships, rheology, and fabrication technology.

Alfrey was born in Siloam Springs, Arkansas and grew up in Muskogee, Oklahoma. He graduated from Muskogee high School in 1934 and went on to receive a B.S. in chemical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1938 and an M.S. in physical chemistry in 1940. He received his Ph.D. in polymer chemistry from Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn in 1943. He worked for two years as a research chemist for Monsanto Chemical Company and then returned to the Polytechnic Institute as a member of the faculty of the Polymer Institute, where he completed his well-known reference work Mechanical Behavior of High Polymers.

In 1950 he joined the technical staff of Dow Chemical and went on to hold Dow's highest research position, of Research Fellow.

Alfrey was the author or co-author of about 100 technical publications and held 24 patents. In his career he received numerous awards including the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) International award in 1965. He also received the A. Cressy Morrison Award from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Bingham medal from the Society of Rheology, the Witco Award in Polymer Chemistry from the American Chemical Society and the H.H. Dow Medal from the Dow Chemical Company.