Alfonso Nieto-Castanon

Alfonso Nieto-Castanon (born September 1972) is a Spanish computational neuroscientist and developer of computational neuroimaging analysis methods and tools. He is a visiting researcher at the Boston University College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences,^[1] and research affiliate at MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research.^[2] His research focuses on the understanding and characterization of human brain dynamics underlying mental function.

Alfonso Nieto-Castanon
Alfonso Nieto-Castanon in 2016
Born	September 1972 Spain
Alma mater	Universidad de Valladolid, Boston University
Known for	functional neuroimaging, subject-specific ROIs, connectome, CONN
Scientific career
Fields	Computational neuroscience, Neuroimaging
Institutions	Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Frank H. Guenther

Early life and education

Nieto-Castanon was born in Spain in 1972.^[3] He was part of the first Spanish team to participate in the International Physics Olympiad in 1990^{[citation needed]}. He went to college at the Universidad de Valladolid from 1991 to 1995 and earned a B.S./M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering. In 1998 he pursued graduate studies in Boston University Cognitive and Neural Systems Department and was awarded a research training fellowship from Fundación Séneca/Cedetel, and a graduate research fellowship from Boston University. He received a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience in 2004.^[4]

Contributions to science

ROI analyses

In some of his early work Nieto-Castanon helped develop novel methods for region of interest (ROI) analyses of fMRI data,^[5] with a focus on multivariate techniques and the use of subject-specific ROIs, where regions of interest are defined differently for each person based on common anatomical or functional landmarks.^[6][7] Subject-specific ROIs allowed researchers to probe the limits of the functional localization hypotheses common in neuroimaging, and better understand the spatial and functional specificity of different brain areas.^[8]

Brain-computer interfaces

In collaboration with Boston University's Neural Prosthesis Laboratory, Nieto-Castanon helped build a Neuroprosthetic device for real-time speech synthesis.^[9] This system was designed to allow patients with locked-in syndrome to produce speech by decoding signals from a neurotrophic electrode implanted in the brain.^[10][11]

Functional connectivity

Nieto-Castanon also developed multiple influential mathematical and computational techniques for functional connectivity analyses,^[12] with a special emphasis on the robust estimation of functional connectivity measures in the presence of subject-motion and physiological noise sources.^[13] In 2011 he developed CONN to integrate and facilitate best practices in functional connectivity studies.^[14] CONN included a combination of novel methods such as multivariate connectivity analyses and dynamic connectivity estimation, together with multiple well known techniques such as psycho-physiological interactions, graph analyses, or independent component analyses. His software has been since widely adopted in the field^{[15][16][17][18][19]} and it is now regularly used in functional connectivity studies, with over 900 citations during 2021 alone^[20]

Nieto-Castanon has given numerous courses and lectures worldwide^{[21][22][23][24][25]} and his work has been cited in over 8000 refereed journal articles to date.^[26]

International competitions

Beyond his research, Nieto-Castanon is also recognized for his participation in international programming and data-analysis competitions. Programming in Matlab, Nieto-Castanon won in 2009 and in 2011 the Color Bridge and Vines MathWorks collaborative-programming competitions.^[27][28] He was also the winner in 2011 of the Microsoft Kinect video gesture identification competition,^[29][30] obtained second place at the Marinexplore and Cornell University Whale Detection audio classification challenge,^[31] took first prize in 2013 Genentech's Flu Forecasting predictive model competition,^[32] and placed second in MathWorks 2014 bin packing optimization competition.^[33] In 2013 Nieto-Castanon was ranked as the third best data-scientist in Kaggle,^[34][35] and he has been ranked as the best Matlab programmer in MathWorks Cody games for seven consecutive years between 2013 and 2019.^[36]