Volos Summer School of Human Genetics 2026
Organised yearly in summer at the University of Thessaly
Join us for 4 days of lectures and workshops revolving around genome-wide association studies.
Location
Join us in sunny Volos (Βόλος) on the coast of Thessaly.
You will find a range of accommodation facilities around the summer school venue.
The Venue
University of Thessaly
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Sekeri & Cheiden,
Pedion Areos,
Zip: 383 34 Volos,
How to get there
Follow this link to Google Maps
Course overview
The Volos Summer School will cover a range of topics surrounding the human genetics of complex traits, with a focus on the computational and statistical analysis of genome-wide data. Areas of focus will be the conduct of genome-wide association studies, meta-analysis of several studies, and the joint analysis of multiple diseases/traits to understand pleiotropy.
The course will be split into seminars and workshops. The former will provide background theory to the topics covered, while the latter will allow students to implement some of the analysis concepts presented during the seminars.
Students will obtain the skills to manipulate and analyse large data sets in a Unix environment and a basic understanding of scripting and programming skills.
Students will also have the opportunity to discuss their own projects and ideas with experienced researchers in the field. At the start of the summer school, students will be asked to form teams and design a genetic study, which will be discussed at the end of the program and evaluated by the instructors. The best project idea will receive an award.
The main objectives of this summer school are to provide students with a solid grounding in the use of bioinformatics tools, key software, statistical and visualization methods and their various applications in genome studies.
Due to the range of material covered, this is an intense four-day course and will require the active participation of students.
Participants are required to present a poster on their past work
Who can attend ?
The Volos Summer School is intended for early career researchers (graduate students or post-docs) interested to learn about the genetics of complex human traits and gain practical skills in bioinformatics and the analysis of genomics data.
We welcome applications from researchers with a strong background in the biological sciences or a quantitative field (mathematics, statistics, computer science, engineering, etc.).
Attendees should have some familiarity with a command-line tool such as UNIX, R or MATLAB, and have some basic statistical knowledge.
All seminars and workshops will be held in English, and a good command of the language is a prerequisite.
You will need a Google account and Google Drive with at least 2GB free storage space. For more details about the platform please have a look here.
Instructors
Eleftheria Zeggini
Director, Institute of Translational Genomics, Helmholtz Munich
Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas
Senior Staff Scientist, Institute of Translational Genomics, Helmholtz Munich
Georgia Katsoula
Research Associate, Institute of Translational Genomics, Helmholtz Munich
Odysseas Sotirios Stergiou
PhD Candidate, Institute of Translational Genomics, Helmholtz Munich
Ana Arruda
Research Associate, Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Ozvan Bocher
Assistant Professor, Unviersité de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France
| 10:00-11:00 |
Welcome Session and Students Introduction (All tutors) Student Project Introduction (Odysseas Sotirios Stergiou) |
| 11:00-12:30 |
Workshop 1: Basic UNIX (optional) Working with the command line, listing and editing files and directories. and/or Additional UNIX File reformatting, pipelines, subshells and scripts. (Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas, all tutors)
|
|
12:30-13:30
|
Lunch break, poster session and student project preparation |
|
13:30-15:00
|
Lecture 1: Current Tools and Best Practices for Performing Genome-Wide Association Scans (Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas)
|
| 15:00-17:00 |
Workshop 2: Quality Control for Genome-Wide Association Scans Calculating and visualising quality metrics for excluding samples and variants. (Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas, Ana Arruda)
|
| 10:00-11:00 |
Lecture 2 (Georgia Katsoula) |
| 11:00-12:00 |
Lecture 3 The statistics of genome-wide association studies (Ozvan Bocher) |
| 12:00-13:00 |
Lecture 4 (Ozvan Bocher) |
| 13:00-14:00 |
Lunch break, poster session and student project preparation |
| 14:00-16:00 |
Workshops 3 and 4 (Ozvan Bocher, Georgia Katsoula/Ana Arruda) |
| 16:00-17:00 |
Student Project Preparation |
| 10:00-11:00 |
Lecture 5 Molecular QTL Mapping in Humans (Odysseas Sotirios Stergiou) |
| 11:00-13:00 |
Workshop 5 Molecular QTL Mapping and Colocalization Workshop Omics data, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and epigenomics are increasingly used in GWAS field. (Odysseas Sotirios Stergiou, Georgia Katsoula) |
| 13:00-14:00 |
Lunch break, poster session and student project preparation |
| 14:00-15:00 |
Lecture/Workshop 6 Publicly Available Bioinformatics Resources Examining the results of a genome-wide association scan. Functionality of variants, previous associations, genomic context. (Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas) |
| 15:00-17:00 |
Student Project Preparation |
|
10:00-11:00 |
Lecture 7 (Ana Arruda) |
|
11:00-12:00 |
Workshop 7 A guide to performing polygenic score analyses. (Ana Arruda, Konstantinos Hatzikotoulas) |
|
12:00-12:30 |
Lecture 8: Complex Trait Genetics and the Genomic Aetiology of Osteoarthritis. (Eleftheria Zeggini) |
|
12:30-13:30 |
Lunch break, poster session, VSS photo and student project preparation |
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13:30-16:30 |
Presentations and Q&A session (Students) |
|
16:30-17:00 |
Closing remarks by Eleftheria Zeggini |
Application
APPLICATION DEADLINE
15 March 2026
CHOSEN PARTICIPANTS WILL BE NOTIFIED BY
6 April 2026
FEES
The course is free for all participants. Students should arrange their own accommodation and transportation. Limited bursaries will be available. Please state in your application if you would like to be considered for a bursary and provide full justification.
LANGUAGE
The courses and workshop will be held in English, and students should also use English when submitting their application.
SELECTION CRITERIA
There are twenty (20) full places for this course. Applicants will be evaluated on the basis of the following criteria:
-
- Expressed motivation of the participant. Students should submit a personal statement explaining their motivation behind attending the summer school, what they hope to learn and how the skills gained during their attendance will help them in future career plans
- Familiarity with a command-line tool such as UNIX, R or MATLAB
- Basic statistical knowledge
- Recommendation from their group’s principal investigator
Apply now!
To apply, please provide the following documents:
✓ Curriculum vitae (CV)
✓ Letter of recommendation
✓ Personal statement (see above)
Send the above to
candidates@volossummerschool.info
before 15.03.2026
Local Organisers
Michalis Vassilakopoulos
Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Thessaly
Dimitrios Bargiotas
Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Thessaly
Chronis Velentzas
PostDoc, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Thessaly
