The director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, was shot on Monday night, Dec. 15, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Although he was taken to a hospital with multiple gunshot wounds, he was pronounced dead on Dec. 16. Loureiro, said to have been born in 1977 of a Sephardic Jewish family in Portugal, is survived by a wife and young children. The lab that he oversaw included over 250 researchers, staff, and students.
Neighbors reported hearing three loud shots. The Massachusetts State Police are investigating. The FBI said, as of Dec. 16, it knew of no connection between the shooting of Loureiro and the Dec 13 shootings at Brown University.
MIT reported that Loureiro “was a researcher at an institute for nuclear fusion in Lisbon before joining MIT. He studied the behavior of plasma and worked to uncover the physics behind astronomical phenomena like solar flares. This included magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence.”
According to NASA, a single magnetic reconnection can release as much energy as the United States as a whole uses in a day. His work, according to his obituary in the MIT News, “involved the design of fusion devices that could harness the energy of fusing plasmas, bringing the dream of clean, near-limitless fusion power closer to reality.”
In 2024, when he was named to head the center, he observed that “Fusion energy will change the course of human history.”
