2025 Talented 12: 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 antibiotic.

He made waves at Corteva by introducing to crop sciences the same strategies and methods that drug chemists use for reaction and catalyst screening. After a few years in discovery chemistry, Shah pitched his idea to create an automation and high-throughput experimentation group. In short order he had a multimillion-dollar budget, a research group, and a new lab to kit out. Using robotics and informatics, the group can more than double the number of new small molecules for discovery.

More recently, he’s applied another cutting-edge method to agrochemistry: generative artificial intelligence. Shah explains that developing a new product usually takes 13–15 years, similar to the timeline for a new drug. An important difference is that a new threat can appear quickly—for instance, a pest expanding its range because of climate change.

Agricultural discovery chemists try to anticipate those threats and the molecules that farmers will need to fight back. Shah sees generative AI as a way to accelerate the first few years of the product development process. If he can do that, crop scientists might need to predict only 10 years ahead instead of 15.

Shah hasn’t lost sight of the people—the farmers—he does his work for. When he talks about optimizing a process that uses a palladium-catalyzed Suzuki coupling, he’s talking about bringing the cost of the product down. “A farmer will take the hit from the weed or pest rather than pay what they can’t afford,” he says.

Shah’s impulse for helping people has always extended beyond the lab. When his graduate adviser at the University of California, Los Angeles, organic chemist Neil Garg, had an idea for a teaching tool to connect concepts in organic chemistry to topics in other sciences, he and Shah quickly got funding and created Biology and Chemistry, Online Notes (BACON), which has been used by tens of thousands of students worldwide.

"He did a ton of outreach at UCLA and in the broader Los Angeles community," Garg says. “This obviously didn’t hurt Tejas’s research productivity and speaks volumes about his character.”

Maybe Shah shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when a member of his graduate thesis committee asked why he was looking for industry jobs rather than becoming a professor with a teaching focus. But Shah was taken aback; he wondered if he was on the wrong track.

He decided then—and still believes—that he can be a teacher anywhere. Shah has mentored new employees at Corteva, and he taught his group there how to do high-throughput experimentation (after teaching himself, of course). He volunteered in Indianapolis during National Chemistry Week.

“A career isn’t about doing one thing,” Shah says. “Your passions in life are always there. It’s about connecting your passion to your career.”