Amit Kumar is a research technician at the Crop Transformation Facility at the University of Illinois. For ROGUE, Amit will be helping to improve the photosynthetic capability and efficiency of plants and tune pathways to enhance the production of organic molecules other than complex carbohydrates, which then can be extracted economically for industrial uses. His focus is to genotype Miscanthus and energycane plants, as well as extending his efforts to study the phenotype and physiological parameter of the selected strains. Amit earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India. He later went on to earn his master's degrees in analytical chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India, and in biochemistry from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Before joining the IGB, Amit was in the biochemistry and microbiology fields. Amit's work has been published in Inorganic Chemistry and Toxicological Sciences.