A professor at MIT, who was an expert in nuclear engineering, has been shot to death after an incident at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, local prosecutors say.
"Massachusetts State Police assigned to the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office responded last night to assist the Brookline Police Department after receiving a report of a man shot at his home on Gibbs Street," according to a statement the Norfolk District Attorney posted to Facebook.
"The victim, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, was transported to an area hospital with apparent gunshot wounds and was subsequently pronounced deceased this morning.This is an active and ongoing homicide investigation. No further information is being released at this time," the DA wrote.
According to CBS News, Loureiro was a “nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal,” and was a lab director at MIT. MIT confirmed his employment to CBS.
Brookline police deputy superintendent Paul Campbell told WBZ-TV that no one was in custody. However, the specific circumstances of the shooting, including any motive, was not yet clear.
"A victim was located who had been shot multiple times," Campbell told the television station. CBS News reported that the professor was taken to the hospital, where he died.
According to his faculty bio page at MIT, the professor was the “Director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Herman Feshbach (1942) Professor of Physics at MIT.”
The bio adds: “He majored in Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon (Portugal) in 2000 and obtained a Ph.D. in Physics at Imperial College London (UK) in 2005. He did post-doctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory between 2005-07, and at the UKAEA Culham Centre for Fusion Energy between 2007-09. Prior to joining MIT in 2016 Loureiro was a researcher at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion at IST Lisbon.”
It notes that Loureiro had “an active interest in several fundamental aspects of magnetized plasma dynamics, such as magnetic reconnection, magnetic field generation and amplification, confinement and transport in fusion plasmas, and turbulence in strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas.”
The page says the professor won a lot of awards. “Prof. Loureiro’s group uses a combination of analytical theory and state-of-the art simulations to investigate several topics in nonlinear plasma dynamics, particularly magnetic reconnection, turbulence and instabilities. He also has an active interest in novel computational techniques for plasma simulation, including machine learning and quantum computing,” the bio page says.