Since its invention in 1899, the shock tube has become a key tool used to study supersonic/hypersonic flows, reaction kinetics, material transformation, spectroscopy, biological systems, and others. While the operating principles of a shock tube have not changed, the past few decades have seen advancements in both shock tube design and utilization, especially for pressure-driven shock tubes used to study high-temperature reaction kinetics. This paper and accompanying plenary lecture will highlight a select number of recent shock tube design innovations that have had an outsized impact on the use of pressure-driven shock tubes to study chemical kinetics. These innovations include the use of a curved driver section, driver inserts, and driver gas tailoring to achieve long test times (> 100 ms); the use of optically accessible, round test sections to provide insight into test gas inhomogeneities and flame phenomena; and the advent of extremely small shock tube facilities for the study of high-temperature reaction kinetics. The second half of this paper will focus on new, emerging frontiers in shock tube research that have come about, in large part, due to the innovations described above. These new frontiers include the use of shock tubes in fuel synthesis, comprehensive speciation for chemical kinetics studies, and high-temperature studies of laminar flames.