Letters to the future: between mind and machine

When Nuno Loureiro was 22, he wrote a letter to his future self – a snapshot of who he hoped to become by 35. How closely would his path, from spacecraft engineering to neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI), follow the trajectory he had imagined?

A physics engineer by training, Nuno had specialised in aerospace at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon and spent his master’s at what is now Airbus Defence and Space in Toulouse, the heart of Europe’s aviation industry. “I was working on an electric thruster for satellites”, he recalls. “The challenge was that charged particles could build up on the spacecraft and interfere with the electronics. My job was to improve the models predicting that behaviour – essentially, preventing the spacecraft from zapping itself”.

He later joined the European Space Agency as a trainee engineer working on MarcoPolo-R, a proposed mission to bring an asteroid sample back to Earth. “We were designing the leg of a lander that would make first contact with the asteroid’s surface – a far cry from biology”.

A Change in Orbit

Things took an unexpected turn during a trip in 2012 to the US, where Nuno was exploring aerospace PhD programmes. “I stumbled upon an article mentioning Rui Costa’s work on brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) – letting the brain communicate directly with external devices – and saw he was setting up a new lab at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF)”.

At university, he’d considered biomedical engineering and had long been drawn to the idea of using technology to restore lost functions. He’d done well at school, and, as he puts it, “in Portugal that often meant people expected you to go to medical school, so the biomedical side had always lingered in the background”.

The interview days for CF’s neuroscience PhD programme were intense but fun. “There was even a disco night. Each of us had to give a one-slide presentation to introduce ourselves, which made the experience more personal than other places. I remember thinking: this place feels different”.

Where Minds Take Flight

A licensed pilot himself, Nuno’s doctoral work at CF under Rui Costa brought his fascination with flight full circle. His PhD focused on teaching people to control machines through thought alone. “We wanted to see if people could learn to pilot drones or flight simulators using BMIs based on EEG, which measures brain activity non-invasively through electrodes on the scalp”. Their approach relied on feedback: users gradually learned, through trial and error, to modulate their thoughts to guide the flight.

Collaborations with José del R. Millán at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and with researchers at the Technical University of Munich helped advance neural-signal decoding and test BMI control in a flight simulator. Nuno’s group went on to secure a European Research Council grant, build custom hardware, and file a pair of patents – the first from Champalimaud Research. From this work came MindReach, a startup Nuno co-founded to bring BMI technology from the lab into real and virtual worlds.

Those years also brought some near crashes. Before giving the world’s first public demonstration of a drone flown purely by brain activity, Nuno trained for weeks in the lab using an EEG cap that measured tiny voltage changes and translated them into flight commands. “One day we went to an aerodrome north of Lisbon to try it out for real. It was windy, the connection wasn’t great, and the drone almost crashed into our car – it missed by about 30 centimetres. It could’ve been an expensive test flight!”.

His time at CF wasn’t without detours either. He co-organised and gave several talks at CF’s Ar public science outreach events – on happiness research, human endurance, and the science of taste, which included making a short film where a Michelin-starred chef and a CF neuroscientist swapped roles for a day. “It was hard to say no”, Nuno admits. “There was so much happening, and you were constantly surrounded by people who challenged your ideas and pushed you to think harder. I miss those interactions”.

Mentorship was another anchor. “Vítor Paixão, a postdoc in Rui’s lab, gave me perspective and guidance. And of course, Rui himself – technically brilliant, but also deeply human. He could see both the smallest detail and the big picture”.

Dear I…

After completing his PhD, Nuno became Head of Data Science & Development at +ATLANTIC, a collaborative laboratory using data science and AI to address environmental and ocean challenges. “One day I’d be visiting fish farms, testing cameras and sensors to detect dead fish – the next, analysing satellite data for ocean-monitoring systems”, he says. “I was applying what I’d learned about systems and data from neuroscience to a very different domain”.

Has there been a common thread across every career turn? “Problem-solving”, he says. “Whether it’s space physics or neuroscience, the challenge is the same: making sense of complex systems”.

In a way, Nuno’s path had been written years earlier – literally. “When I was 22, in Toulouse, I wrote a letter to my future self about what I hoped life would look like at 35”, he says. “I wrote about robotics, helping people in wheelchairs stand up and look others in the eye, maybe even becoming a doctor. Even then, there was this tension between physics and biology – between exploring outer space and inner space”.

That tension has played out ever since, a career spent moving back and forth between both worlds, finding ways to connect them.

Today, Nuno works as a machine-learning developer and consultant for Rancho BioSciences, an international company building bioinformatics and AI tools for the life sciences. “One of my main projects is developing tools to help pathologists at a pharma company digitise and analyse microscopy images more efficiently. It’s about making better use of the enormous image databases they already have. I used to work on what you’d see through a telescope – now it’s what you see through a microscope”.

His work today parallels where he sees CF heading next. “The Champalimaud Foundation has extraordinary people and facilities”, he says. “The challenge now is keeping pace with new technologies – especially the integration of AI into medicine and science. That’s going to define the next 20 years”.
 

Nuno Loureiro, Former PhD Student in Neuroscience at Champalimaud Foundation, Current Data Engineer and Data Science Consultant at Rancho BioSciences
 

Text by Hedi Young, Science Writer and Content Developer of the Champalimaud Foundation's Communication, Events & Outreach Team

Full 20 Years, 20 Stories Collection here.