Folashade (Shade) Sabitu joined Terrana Biosciences in 2025 as the Head of Regulatory Affairs. In this role, she is responsible for enabling the company’s freedom to operate through commercial registrations, product biosafety and regulatory affairs.

Shade has spent the last 17 years ensuring innovative and sustainable agricultural biotech products get into the hands of farmers around the world by working with regulators and other stakeholders to ensure the environmental release and commercialization of these products.

Prior to Terrana, Shade led the Global Registration and Regulatory Affairs team at Pivot Bio where she secured the registration of the first gene-edited, nitrogen-producing microbial inoculants for corn growers in the US, Canada, and Kenya. She also enabled product field testing of these products in several more countries. Before Pivot Bio, she supported another Flagship Pioneering company, Indigo Ag, by obtaining grain licenses, ensuring product biosafety assessments, and obtaining OMRI certifications for several of its microbial products.

She began her career at Corteva Agriscience (formerly DuPout Pioneer) where she developed and validated nutrient composition methodologies for corn and soybean seeds by UPLC and eventually moved into a Regulatory Affairs role to support the commercialization of said seed technologies.

Shade has also been an active participant at various trade associations including BPIA and BIO where she has helped draft tactical risk and science-based policies for genetically engineered microbial products.

She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a Bachelors degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a Masters in Applied Molecular Biology. She also has an MBA from the University of Delaware Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics.