Gaia comes from a family of classical scholars and after finishing high school at a classical lyceum, and fascinated by Kant and Hegel, she enrolled in the Faculty of Physics. Then one day, just to accompany her high school sweetheart, there she was, attending a physics class, listening to a lecture by professor Giorgio Salvini. Three months later she dropped out of philosophy and enrolled in the faculty of physics at the university of Rome. Extremely young, she received a scholarship from the Lincei Academy and graduated with honors in elementary particle physics. She then obtained a Ph.D. in physics and landed a permanent job as experimental physicist in INFN's National Laboratories in Frascati. All of these achievements were accomplished in a short time span. Today she has a seven-year-old son, Marco, and works at CERN in the LHCb experiment where she's involved with high momentum measurement within the experiment and is in charge of muon identification.

"Do I believe in love at first sight? Of course. One physics lesson changed my whole life. Besides, this is how life should be, because when you follow your real interests and you follow your true talents, everything becomes easier and obstacles don't discourage you. My attraction to physics revealed itself suddenly, and it has never let go. Nevertheless, I play with Marco a lot, I love skiing, listening to music and dancing salsa. "