Abby is a rising fourth-year biochemistry at UCLA and has worked for Dr. William Gelbart since her freshman year. The lab researches primarily physical virology, aiming to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms behind viral self-assembly and disassembly. In recent years, they have begun trying to harness these properties for pharmaceutical applications as well as capitalizing on the use of self-amplifying viral genomes as therapeutics. Abby’s current project aims to develop an antiviral therapy against yellow fever virus via the use of defective-interfering RNA. She creates defective truncates of the yellow fever genome, replicable by viral proteins synthesized by infected cells, and delivers them to cells so that they will sequester cellular and viral resources. The full-length yellow fever then cannot replicate and package at as high a rate, and infection will die off as the viral proteins cease to be made and only the shorter, harmless truncates are replicated. Previously, Abby has studied the effects of RNA secondary structure on viral assembly and hopes to use this knowledge to package and deliver her successful antiviral candidates. Abby would like to thank Drs. William Gelbart and Charles Knobler for their constant support of her work, and the Amgen Foundation for allowing her the opportunity to focus on research for the summer.