Amartya Palamadai Jayakumar is a junior James Scholar majoring in materials science and engineering and biochemistry with a minor in chemistry. His research interests include synthetic biology, structural biology, and genetic engineering in medicine, with hopes of engineering living systems to produce antibiotics and other therapeutics for biomedical applications. At Illinois, Amartya works with the Kim Group using atomic force microscopy (AFM) to investigate how the bis-intercalating drug echinomycin alters DNA structure, including induced bending and conformational changes due to echinomycin binding to DNA. He is a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and has served as a course assistant for three semesters, helping students understand core programming concepts during office hours and labs, while assisting with testing and debugging course materials. At Mayo Clinic, Amartya will work with Dr. Matthew Schellenberg using structural and cellular biology approaches to determine the structure of ternary complexes involving the E3 ubiquitin ligase subunit CRBN, PROTAC molecules, and target proteins such as estrogen receptors and GSPT1 to support the design of targeted therapeutics for breast cancer treatment as he prepares to pursue a PhD in the field.