Advisor: Sarah J. Seashols-Williams, Ph.D., Department of Forensic Science

This research aims to employ microscopic techniques with novel technology to isolate whole bone cells from weathered, degraded, or otherwise challenged skeletal remains. By exploitation of the bone's microstructure, the goal is to "pluck" out individual cells from thinly sliced, demineralized cortical bone tissue using optical tweezers and other micromanipulation techniques to bypass traditional pre-extraction processing (i.e., pulverization) of skeletal remains prior to downstream DNA analysis.