Originally from Tempe, AZ, Cera is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe with her maternal family originating from South Dakota. Cera graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience. While in school, she played on the Johns Hopkins soccer team. Following graduation, Cera was an NIH-funded post-baccalaureate research education program scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where her research focused on Neurofilament, a cytoskeletal protein, in the context of spinal muscular atrophy in Charlotte Sumner's lab.

Cera joined the Bai lab in 2020 and is a graduate student in the Molecular and Cellular Biology program at the UW. Utilizing a program called NeuroPAL, she hopes to understand the relationship between neurons and their location. In her free time, she enjoys playing with her cat, Xena, going on hikes, and visiting with her family.