He was born on June 25th, 1964, in Lisbon, Portugal, graduated in electronics engineering at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 1987, and received his PhD in computer science from Delft University of Technology in 1999, with a thesis on Semantic Feature Modeling. Since then he has been with the Computer Graphics and CAD/CAM 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 modelling techniques for the specification and generation of both virtual worlds and game play; serious gaming; game adaptivity; and interpretation mechanisms for in-game data.

He has many publications in international journals, books and conference proceedings, has served as member of several program committees, and is associate editor of the International Journal of Computer Games Technology.

Rafael Bidarra also teaches and supervises several courses and projects on game technology within the computer science programme, including a pioneer project on Computer Games, for 2nd-year computer science students.

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