Jayan earned both a Bachelors and Masters of Science in Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where he studied scanning probe microscopy and polymer biomaterials. He spent two years studying the properties of disordered proteins using AFM with Atom Sarker at The Ohio State University before joining the Biophysics Graduate Program at Washington University in 2010. He was a member of the Galburt Lab from 2011 to 2016 and studied the regulatory mechanisms of mycobacterial transcription using fluorescence-based stopped flow techniques.
He is now an NRC fellow between the labs of David Ross at NIST and Chris Voigt at MIT.