Tejas Shah

“When I was applying for jobs, I had no idea there was a field of agrochemistry,” Tejas Shah says. At the suggestion of his graduate adviser, Shah applied for an opening at what is now Corteva Agriscience, which makes chemicals for farming. He has spent the last decade with the company, where he created its first chemistry automation and high-throughput experimentation group and used computational tools to find a small-molecule herbicide with a new mode of action. The compound is proprietary and still in development, so Shah couldn’t discuss it in detail, but he says it’s the first of its kind in decades.Shah might never have guessed he’d become an agrochemist, but he always knew he wanted to help people. As a kid, Shah thought about becoming a doctor or a lawyer. The switch flipped toward chemistry when he did undergraduate research at Rutgers University. A month before his entrance exam for medical school, his group’s catalysis paper was accepted in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Shah couldn’t ignore the thrill of having done something completely new. He stopped studying for the exam and made plans to get a chemistry PhD.One thing that drew Shah to agrochemistry was its similarity to pharmaceutical chemistry, which he had more exposure to in graduate school. “You make a molecule, test it on an organism, and see if it has an effect,” he says. From that perspective, a protective fungicide is like a vaccine. A curative fungicide treats infection, much like an