Gaia Molinaro

I am a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, where I take a computational approach to understand the key to intelligent, open-ended cognition and behavior as part of Anne Collins’s Computational Cognitive Neuroscience lab. I recently visited Pierre-Yves Oudeyer’s Flowers AI & CogSci lab at Inria as a Chateaubriand STEM Fellow.

In the summer of 2024, I interned as a Machine Learning SWE at Meta, where I worked to improve content recommendations and engagement for 3 billion users. In 2023, I was part of the R&D team at Thimus, a world-leading company in cultural and applied neuroscience. In 2022, I was one of the Nova top 11 Italian talents under 25 in Healthcare & Bio Sciences.

Before my PhD, I obtained a Neuroscience BSc from King’s College London and a Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc from UCL, where I worked at Tali Sharot’s Affective Brain lab.

I am also the author of an Italian children’s book titled La gara di pattinaggio, which was beautifully illustrated by my brother Daniel and is now available on Amazon. All proceeds from the first 100 copies are being donated to Fondazione Dottor Sorriso.