A native of Italy, Filizola received her bachelors and masters degrees in chemistry from the [https://archive.today/20160527225305/http://chemicalsciences.unina.it/ University Federico II in Naples] (class of 1993), and earned her PhD in computational chemistry from the Second University of Naples in 1999, though conducting most of her doctoral studies at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. She went on to pursue a postdoctorate in computational biophysics from the Molecular Research Institute in California, moving to New York City in 2001.