Group Leader, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
Fabio Petroni is a Group Leader at the Rome site of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Europe’s flagship intergovernmental organisation for the life sciences. He leads a lab applying artificial intelligence to scientific discovery, building agentic systems that accelerate biological research.
With around 15 years’ experience across academia and industry, he co-founded Samaya AI, a US-based, AI-first financial knowledge-discovery company, and previously worked in Meta AI’s FAIR lab, where he contributed to foundational advances in knowledge-intensive natural language processing and co-developed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique now central to how AI systems access and reason over information.