Gaia Molinaro

I am a third-year Psychology 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 am currently visiting Pierre-Yves Oudeyer's Flowers lab at the Inria Center of the University of Bordeaux, France.

In 2022, I was nominated in the Nova 111 Student list as one of the top 11 Italian talents in the field of Healthcare & Bio Sciences. I was also part of the R&D team at Thimus, a world-leading company in cultural and applied neuroscience, particularly in the Food & Beverage sector.

Prior to my PhD, I obtained a Neuroscience BSc from King's College London and a Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc from UCL, where I interned 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’m always happy to meet new people from all backgrounds. Click on the icons below to reach out via email or LinkedIn.