Nuno F.G. Loureiro, Professor and Director of Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, Shot Dead at Home

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Authorities in New England are investigating the brutal assassination of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear science and physics professor who was gunned down in his own home, Us Weekly has learned.

Law enforcement sources confirm Portugal native Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 48, died on Tuesday, December 18, after being shot the night before.

Police started getting calls about gunshots from Loureiro’s neighbors around 8:30 p.m. on Monday, December 16.

“I thought at first it was somebody in our apartment kicking in a door or something, so I called the neighbors and they said no,” one neighbor offered to CBS News.

Cops found Loureiro suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.

Loureiro, who taught nuclear science, engineering, and physics at MIT, was rushed to Boston Hospital for treatment, but doctors were unable to save him.

Anne Greenwald, another of Loureiro’s neighbor’s, said he had a young family who attended the local schools.

“It’s horrible, very scary,” Greenwald told CBS, adding she lived in the neighborhood for 40 years.

Massachusetts State Police are handling the ongoing investigation.

Loureiro was the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center after joining the faculty in 2016.

In a statement, MIT mourned Loureiro’s violent death, saying in a statement, “Our deepest sympathies are with his family, students, colleagues, and all those who are grieving.”

The university said that “focused outreach and conversations are taking place within our community to offer care and support for those who knew Professor Loureiro.”

Police have not provided a description of any possible suspects, and it was unclear if they have a potential person of interest in mind.

In January, Loureiro was one of nearly 400 scientists and engineers honored with the Presidential Early Career Award by former President Joe Biden.

The award, established by former President Bill Clinton in 1996, recognizes scientists and engineers who show “exceptional potential for leadership early in their research career.”

In a profile piece from 2018, the professor said that, even as a little boy growing up in Viseu, Portugal, when “everyone else wanted to be a policeman or a fireman,” he already had dreams of being a scientist.

A theoretical physicist and fusion scientist, “Nuno had joint appointments in nuclear science and engineering and in physics,” reads the MIT statement. “He was also associated with the MIT Energy Initiative and MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Recently named the Herman Feshbach (1942) Professor of Physics, he was an expert on a fundamental plasma process called magnetic reconnection, as well as on magnetic field generation and amplification, confinement and transport in fusion plasmas and turbulence in strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas.”

Loureiro studied first in Lisbon, where he earned an undergraduate degree in physics at Instituto Superior Técnico. He then moved to London to earn his PhD in physics from Imperial College. Following postdoctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and at the UKAEA Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, he returned to Portugal in 2009 to become a principal investigator at IST Lisbon’s Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion.