I am a senior physics major here at Willamette with math and German minors. I will be completing my undergraduate thesis in the Altman lab, working with RPE cells and the molecular motor myosin VIIa. My goal for this project is to use RNA interference to silence the expression of myosin VIIa in RPE cells. This will then allow me to observe whether or not myosin VIIa is involved in trafficking processes within RPE cells by using both a confocal microscope and an optical trap.