Gaia Molinaro

I am a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft, where my research aims to enhance human capabilities through AI.

I got my PhD from the University of California, Berkeley’s Computational Cognitive Neuroscience lab, where I used behavioral experiments and computational modeling to understand the key to flexible, open-ended reinforcement learning in humans and machines. While completing my PhD, I visited the Flowers AI & CogSci lab at Inria as a Chateaubriand STEM Fellow.

Before starting at Microsoft, I interned at the Amazon AGI Lab as a Member of Technical Staff, evaluating language models’ alignment through the lens of cognitive science. I also spent two summers interning at Meta 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 the 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.