Carlotta grew up in the Veneto region of Italy, where she graduated with a degree in molecular biology from Padua University. She pursued her PhD at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, where she developed new CRISPR technologies for multiple organisms and filed for one of the earliest CRISPR patents on editing eukaryotic cells. After completing her PhD in synthetic biology in 2015, she moved to Columbia as a Simons Junior Fellow in the Harris Wang lab to develop new genome-engineering tools for modifying intractable human-associated microbiota and microbiome engineering applied to in vivo therapeutics. In collaboration with the Simunovic lab at Columbia, Carlotta runs multiple projects developing new genomics tech applied to stem cell engineering and human organoids that can be used to dissect the detailed cell fate choices in human organogenesis.