Nuno FG Loureiro, a 47-year-old MIT professor, physicist and fusion scientist, was shot and killed at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was fatally shot at his home near Boston, and authorities announced Tuesday they had opened a homicide investigation.
Nuno FG Loureiro, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, was shot dead Monday evening at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He died Tuesday at a local hospital, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
The prosecutor’s office said no suspects had been arrested as of Tuesday afternoon and that its investigation was ongoing.
Loureiro, who joined MIT in 2016, was named last year to head MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he aimed to advance clean energy technology and other research. The center, one of the school’s largest labs, had more than 250 people working in seven buildings when he took over.
Loureiro, who was married, grew up in Viseu, central Portugal, and studied in Lisbon before earning a doctorate in London, according to MIT. He was a researcher at a nuclear fusion institute in Lisbon before joining MIT, the press release said.
“He shone brightly as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader, and was universally admired for his articulate and compassionate manner,” Dennis Whyte, an engineering professor who previously directed MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, told a campus publication.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement that Loureiro’s death was a “shocking loss.”
The Brookline homicide investigation comes as police in Providence, Rhode Island, about 50 miles away, continue to search for the shooter who killed two students and injured nine others at Brown University on Saturday. The FBI said Tuesday there was no connection between the crimes.
A 22-year-old Boston University student who lives near Loureiro’s Brookline apartment told the Boston Globe that she heard three loud noises Monday night and feared they were gunshots. “I had never heard anything that loud, so I assumed it was gunshots,” Liv Schachner reportedly said. “It’s hard to understand. It seems like it keeps happening.”
Some of Loureiro’s students went to his home, an apartment in a three-story brick building, on Tuesday afternoon to pay their respects, the Globe reported.
The United States Ambassador to Portugal, John J. Arrigo, expressed his condolences in an online message honoring Loureiro for his leadership and contributions to science.
“It is not hyperbole to say that MIT is the place where we can find solutions to humanity’s greatest problems,” Loureiro said when he was named head of the plasma science laboratory last year. “Fusion energy will change the course of human history.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
