Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center since May 2024, was shot multiple times in the foyer of his Brookline apartment building around 8:30 p.m. on December 15, 2025. Neighbors heard the gunshots; he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead early December 16. Norfolk County authorities opened a homicide investigation. Loureiro had joined the MIT faculty in 2016, become deputy director in 2022, and led the center’s more than 250 researchers working on plasma dynamics, magnetic reconnection, and fusion confinement. On December 18 authorities connected the killing to Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, the Portuguese national already suspected in the December 13 Brown University shooting that killed two students and wounded nine. Ballistics linked one of two Glock handguns recovered with Neves-Valente to the Loureiro scene. Neves-Valente was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Salem, New Hampshire storage unit. Both men had studied at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. An April 2026 FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit assessment concluded the targets were symbolic of perceived personal academic and professional failures.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/us/mit-professor-shot-brookline-nuno-loureiro.html
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