Data Architect
Assistant Professor, Biology and Neuroscience @ ISPA - Instituto Universitário
Visiting Scientist @ Champalimaud Center for the Unknown
Former Data Architect @ International Brain Laboratory

Niccolò Bonacchi was born in Italy and has been a resident of Portugal for over 30 years. He started his career as a circus performer, where he became fascinated with "people watching" in order to play different characters. This prompted him to complete a degree in Rehabilitation and Social Inclusion at ISPA-IU and work for several years at the interface of art and social psychology. His lifelong interest in games, puzzles, computers, artificial intelligence, and science fiction eventually coalesced into a fascination for biology, neurobiology, and neuroscience. Dr. Bonacchi holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Nova University of Lisbon (UNL) and an MSc in Psychobiology from the Higher Institute of Applied Psychology (ISPA-IU). His doctoral work at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown (CCU) examined how brains represent spatial objectives, olfactory cues, the results they anticipate, and how these expectations affect both behavior and brain function. During his PhD, he also contributed to the development of the Bonsai-RX programming language, which is now utilized in research laboratories all around the world.
Dr. Bonacchi is a visiting professor at ISPA-IU where he teaches graduate-level courses in experimental programming and neurobiology. He is the principal developer of the experimental data acquisition system and processes at the International Brain Laboratory (IBL), where he currently holds the position of Data Architect. His contributions to the IBL's main objective are centered on the development, maintenance, and definition of standards for a system charged with reproducing and sharing data, methods, results, and analyses throughout this worldwide collaboration and to the greater neuroscientific community. Additionally, Dr. Bonacchi has been providing consultancy services on data and metadata architecture for ARC-COGITATE, a separate multinational collaboration studying consciousness. His primary contribution is the creation of a metadata ontology that can categorize studies in systems neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience.
Dr. Bonacchi is interested in bridging the gap between mechanistic explanations of brain processes and the emergent cognitive constructs that underpin them. To do this, he has concentrated his efforts on developing ever more precise and accurate approaches to behavioral quantification and data analysis, which he believes are critical for contextualizing and interpreting the many neurophysiological measurements of brain activity. He is also enthusiastic about the open movement in its various forms, particularly in regard to open science and its potential to improve experimental reproducibility.

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