Gaia Molinaro

I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where I use behavioral experiments and computational modeling to understand the key to flexible, open-ended reinforcement learning in humans and machines 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.

I am currently interning at the Amazon AGI Labs as a Member of Technical Staff, bridging Cognitive Science and AI research. Previously, I interned at Meta: in 2025, as a Research Scientist using LLMs to understand teenagers’ use of social media; in 2024, as a Machine Learning SWE working to improve content recommendations for over 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 (2020) and a Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc from UCL (2021), graduating at the top of my class in both. While at UCL, I worked at Tali Sharot’s Affective Brain lab and co-founded the Behavioural Innovations Society.

I am also the author of an Italian children’s book titled La gara di pattinaggio, which was beautifully illustrated by my brother Daniel. We are donating all proceeds from the first 100 copies to Fondazione Dottor Sorriso.