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.

I interned at Meta twice: 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 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. We are donating all proceeds from the first 100 copies to Fondazione Dottor Sorriso.