Amartya Palamadai Jayakumar | 2026 SURF Participant

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 member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and has served as a course assistant for two 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 integrating structural and cellular biology to study how cells repair complex DNA damage and how these processes influence cancer development and treatment response as he prepares to pursue a PhD in the field.