Paola D’Aloja graduated from the University of Urbino, Italy, with a Bachelor's degree in Biology in 1987. She earned her PhD degree in Molecular Virology in 1999 at the University of Rome. She has been a researcher at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome since 1992. From 1999 to 2001 she was a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Erlangen, Germany. Up until 2009, she worked in HIV research at the National Center of AIDS. In 2008 she moved to the National Center for Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion to conduct studies in Maternal and Perinatal Health Epidemiology.