Francesca Ferlaino was born in Naples, Italy. She studied physics at the University of Naples Federico II (1995–2000) and was an undergraduate research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste (1999–2000). She did a PhD in physics at the University of Florence and the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) (2001–2004). In 2007 she moved to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where she was a research and teaching associate and started her own research group. In 2014 she became a professor of physics at the University of Innsbruck and research director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.