Gaia Molinaro

I am a Computational Cognitive Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, where I take a computational approach to understand how people learn complex tasks from sparse rewards, how they set and achieve their own goals, and how different cognitive functions work together to enable these processes. I do my research at Anne Collins' Computational Cognitive Neuroscience lab. I recently visited Pierre-Yves Oudeyer's Flowers lab at the Inria Center of the University of Bordeaux as a Chateaubriand STEM Fellowship recipient.

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 nominated as one of the top 11 Italian talents under 25 in the field of Healthcare & Bio Sciences by Nova.

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. During my MSc, I was also Director of Events and Welfare Officer at the UCL Behavioural Innovations Society, content creator at Testable, and Unexplored Neuroscience fellow.

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. The best part? We are donating all proceeds from the first 100 copies to Fondazione Dottor Sorriso to help bring joy to children across Italian hospitals.

I’m always happy to meet new people from all backgrounds. Click on the icons below to reach out via email or LinkedIn.