Cerys Academy is an educational initiative from Cerys Bio, built on the same belief that drives our work: advanced science should be accessible to everyone. Gene therapy and genomics are reshaping medicine, yet the skills needed to understand and contribute to these fields are often locked behind expensive programs and specialized degrees. Cerys Academy aims to change that by offering free, live web sessions taught by scientists and engineers who work in the field. Each session pairs core biological concepts with the computational tools used to study them. Participants will move from the fundamentals of how genetic information is stored and expressed, to how that information is read by sequencers, to how the resulting data is processed, analyzed, and interpreted. Along the way, we connect each topic to real-world applications, including the development of AAV-based gene therapies. Whether you are a student exploring a career in biotech, a wet-lab scientist looking to build computational skills, or a software developer curious about biology, Cerys Academy offers a practical starting point.
Session Curriculum
Sessions are held live online. Dates and times will be announced – check back soon or contact us to be notified.
| Session | Topic | What You'll Learn | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foundations of Molecular Biology | DNA structure, the central dogma, transcription, translation, and gene regulation | TBA |
| 2 | Tools of the Molecular Lab | PCR, cloning, plasmids, and an introduction to DNA and RNA sequencing technologies | TBA |
| 3 | Introduction to Bioinformatics | Biological databases, sequence formats (FASTA, FASTQ), and working at the command line | TBA |
| 4 | From Reads to Variants | Quality control, read alignment (SAM/BAM), and variant calling (VCF) | TBA |
| 5 | Reproducible Pipelines | Scripting with Python and Biopython, and automating analyses with workflow tools such as Nextflow and Snakemake | TBA |
| 6 | Gene Therapy in Practice | How AAV vectors work, how gene therapies are designed and evaluated, and where bioinformatics fits in | TBA |
