Me

My name is André Bastos da Cunha.

Professionally, I define myself as a technology driven innovator with a strong cross-disciplinary experience and background. I am a Physicist Engineer focused on computation, electronics and instrumentation by training with a proven record on several research projects in very different fields from optical communications to biomedical engineering to name a few. To be able to face the broad challenges outside my core skills, I underwent training in software engineering, biomedical engineering, neuroscience, oil & gas, data science and machine learning among others.

Over the last four years I worked as a researcher in a co-joint private and public consortium with 14 other researchers accross 6 countries in a major EU project in order to develop tools, frameworks and strategies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The core objective of this project was to develop a smart wireless brain Implant to be used in pre-clinical studies on animals. Although I had no formal authority over my peers, the goals for my research enabled me to assume a product manager role as the core of my work was heavily dependent on others with more independent goals. Despite this, I was able to establish bridges connecting biology, electronics, software and nano-fabrication efforts to make a product out of our project.

My role in this ambitious project comprised the following multidisciplinary efforts:

  • Coach, mentor and supervise several engineering MSc senior students in the University of Oslo facilitating research strategies, tools and project building throughout their thesis;

  • Develop an Agile iterative engineering process based on SCRUM to coordinate software and hardware development coordinating efforts with neurobiologists, biotechnology engineers and electronic designers to define requirements and establish a roadmap of experiments and prototypes;

  • Develop an embedded electronic system software platform and program its firmware in C for the control and communication of the brain implant;

  • Develop a digital electronic embedded system using VHDL, Verilog and digital design simulation tools for the optical system for the stimulation of neurons and electrical impedance and electrochemical measurements for the detection of neurotransmitters;

  • Develop machine learning and data analysis algorithms to determine prediagnostical information about the conditions in study using Python and Matlab;

  • Develop computational numerical experiments to better understand brain conditions using Python;During my studies, I did a lot of a work covering IT management, Web developing and marketing in a college related Science Outreach NGO NFIST (Núcleo de Física do Instituto Superior Técnico) and also worked part time in the Customer Support Department of the ISP Ar Telecom.

For my BSc in Engineering Physics, I focused on electronics instrumentation and computational physics and have developed some simulations for many physical problems mostly to be used as pedagogical tools for the teaching of Physics at college level. An overview of some of these projects can be consulted here in my personal webpage. I also developed multiple electronic instrumentation applications such as the microprocessor control of a remote experiment using PIC, the implementation of a communication protocols such as GPIB using VHDL and the development of an oximeter, a electrocardiograph, a sonar and several sensors. Later on my MSc, I had training in higher level contextual areas such as oil & gas applications, the energy markets, biomedical and healthcare applications, science management among others.

Right after my MSc, I partnered with a colleague to create a startup company, ePlug. Our objective was to create a small range of IoT smart devices in order to help people in Portugal to save money in the recently liberalised energy market combined with a data driven software platform to predict the users electricity consumption behaviours through profiling and therefore optimize electricity consumption. In this position but as well as in my other work experiences, an all hands on deck atitude was fundamental from designing UI prototypes or even visual marketing identities in Photoshop, designing electronics and programming firmware, working with high level programming languages to perform mathematical models, I fancy myself as a Jack of all trades, master of none.

Later on, as a junior researcher, I pioneered an optical communications research project where I designed a proof of concept experiment for which I also developed a control system software for optical modulation hardware. The objective of this experiment was to exploit a quantum physical property of light in order to obtain theoretically unlimited speeds in network infrastructures.

Before returning to research in Oslo, I was at LM Ericsson in Athlone, Ireland in a program for Software Engineers where I had intensive training and obtained a college certified training in Software Engineering focused on Agile development methodologies such as SCRUM or XP programming and the Java programming language. In LM Ericsson, I had the opportunity to apply these frameworks along with a cross-disciplinary and multicultural team in a training project.

I also worked voluntarily for many years in a University backed NGO focused on Science Outreach. We organized major events with pre-college students showcasing Physics experiments. After many years of success, we assembled a truck with these experiments and went to the poorest regions in Portugal to captivate the youngest to pursue college educations. Later on we were able to send a team to East Timor to teach both teachers and students in Physics with little to no access to the kind of means we have in the developed world.Over the years, I have worked or studied in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, the USA and of course, Norway.