André Mendonça Email & Phone Number

Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

At Virtuleap, a leading VR and AR startup specializing in Brain Training, Performance Monitoring, and Cognitive Diagnostics, I analyze extensive user data from 60k+ users. My responsibilities include exploring data, deriving insights, demographic and behavioral data clustering for user profiling, ML model implementation and deployment, identification of digital biomarkers for cognitive health risk assessment, and enhancing behavioral data collection methods.

Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Project Manager of ”LaMAA” - Laboratório de Metacognição: Aprender a Aprender - a Science Education project funded by BPI la Caixa and Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, in a collaboration between the Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal, TreeTree2, Lisbon, Portugal and Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal.LaMAA is a science education project that focuses on metacognitive and confidence calibration strategies, with a strong interest in developing these tools for students that come from socio-economical debilitating backgrounds in Portugal. Our two target groups are:1) High-school students. We give them tools to optimise their learning and foster their resilience and autonomy while learning complex subjects. We teach Neuroscience, Programming, Data Analysis and Machine Learning. These courses are done on-site, on-line and also exist autonomously in the form of Massive open online course (MOOCs).2) 3rd cycle students. We gamify the learning process of Science related topics (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Natural Sciences). We do so by creating a highly interactive classroom in which students have to explore, collaborate, test and learn in order to win an ongoing competition. These lectures are designed to work both on-site and on-line.We also analyse learning data, think critically about it and use feedback to adapt. All with the collaboration of our students.

Figueira De Castelo Rodrigo, Guarda, Portugal

The iNature project is a collaboration between Associação Transumância e Natureza, Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, Plataforma de Ciência Aberta, Barca D’Alva, Portugal, and the University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands.Development of guided tours’ scripts based on four interviews done to local population with different life experiences regarding the Faia Brava Natural Reserve, dedicated to Nature preservation and conservation, located at the Côa Valley, Portugal. These scripts explain and contextualise, to the general public (tourists, visitors and students), the vast wildlife living at Faia Brava and its History.

Lisbon Area, Portugal

"Cérebro - mais vasto que o céu / Brain - wider than the sky" was a museum exhibition hosted atthe Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, PortugalDevelopment of science communication texts on the topic of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Robotics. Work combined with scriptwriting, coordination and training of exhibition tour guides (University students, PhD students and Neuroscience Researchers) on the topics of Evolutionary Neuroscience, Biological Basis of the Mind and Artificial Intelligence.

Lisbon Area, Portugal

Post-doctoral work under the supervision of Zachary F. Mainen (Systems Neuroscience Lab, CNP) and Alex Pouget (University of Geneva), and in close collaboration with Jan Drugowitsch (Harvard University). Extension of the work developed during PhD, by conduction new control olfactory experiments and expanding on computational models of perceptual decision-making. By combining learning rules with decision confidence estimation in a novel way, we developed a Bayesian Optimal Machine Learning model that explained appar- ent counter-intuitive rodent behavior observed in an olfactory task. This fruitful collaboration originated two back-to-back publications on the role of confidence and reinforcement learning in perceptual decision-making.

Lisbon Area, Portugal

PhD work on the topic of reinforcement learning and its involvement in olfactory perceptual decision- making at the Systems Neuroscience Lab, CNP, Lisbon, under the supervision of Zachary F. Mainen. Developed behavioral tasks in rodents, high-level analysis of both behavioral and neuronal data, and computational models of decision-making.

Lisbon Area, Portugal

PhD student at International PhD Neuroscience Programme (INDP), CNP, IGC, Oeiras, Portugal.Received intensive one-year training on general concepts of Biology and Neuroscience, with focus on ongoing open questions in both fields of research. Weekly modules involved assimilation of both theoretical concepts and practical laboratory work.

Lisbon Area, Portugal

MSc student at the Computational Genomic Laboratory, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), Oeiras, Portugal.MSc work developed on the subject of gene loss in intracellular bacteria, under the supervision of José Pereira-Leal. Analyzed genomic information of bacterial intracellular endosymbiants and parasites. Developed computational models to explain the process of evolutionary gene loss in small organisms.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Neuroscience

Thesis “The role of reinforcement learning in perceptual decision-making”. Advisor: Dr. Zachary F. Mainen

Master'S Degree, Engineering Physics

Thesis “Simulations of random and selective gene loss for the study of reduced bacteria”. Advisor: Dr. José Pereira-Leal

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Engineering Physics