He was born on June 25th, 1964, in Lisbon, Portugal, graduated in 1987 in electronics engineering at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and in 1999 received his PhD in computer science from Delft University of Technology, with a thesis on Semantic Feature Modeling. Since then he has been with the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group, where he has previously held positions as post-doc researcher and assistant professor.

He leads the Faculty's research line on game technology, and supervises various MSc and PhD projects in this area.
His current research interests include: procedural and semantic modeling techniques for the specification and generation of both virtual worlds and gameplay; game adaptivity; serious gaming; and interpretation mechanisms for in-game data.

He has numerous publications in international journals, books and conference proceedings, and has served as member of many conference program committees.

Rafael Bidarra also teaches and supervises several courses and projects on video games, including the mythical (BSc) Games Project and a pioneer (MSc) project on Building Serious Games.

He is a member of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, Eurographics and AAAI.