Portugal’s small community of nuclear fusion scientists mourned the loss of one of their own on Friday, as more details emerged about the killing of M.I.T. professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Massachusetts.
Prosecutors late on Thursday named a fellow Portuguese citizen as the suspected killer.
At the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, the nation’s premier school for science and engineering, the staff was reeling from the revelation that Dr. Loureiro and Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the man accused of his murder, had studied physics together in the late 1990s.
While fellow scientists remembered Dr. Loureiro with warmth and admiration for his accomplishments in the field of nuclear fusion and plasma, no one seemed to recall Mr. Neves Valente or his time there as an undergraduate.
The U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, Leah Foley, said she believed that the two men knew one another from that time, having studied physics in the same cohort for five years. But the university offered no details of Mr. Neves Valente’s time there other than a confirmation that he had graduated.
After graduation he briefly worked as a teaching assistant before moving to the United States, according to the Diário da República, the Portuguese government’s official gazette.
Dr. Loureiro, however, remained at the school, as a researcher and then team leader at its Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion.
In a statement sent to journalists, the school recalled “a brilliant colleague, with whom it was a scientific and personal pleasure to collaborate.”
His colleagues remembered a star in his field.
“He was really a top guy in his area, recognized internationally,” said Bruno Gonçalves, the director of the institute. “For our community, it was a loss for us when Nuno went to the U.S., but we were very proud that he achieved this position.”
“I think he was one of the first Portuguese to arrive at a top institution in the U.S.,” he added.
Dr. Gonçalves last met with Dr. Loureiro at a conference last year in Rome, where the two were attending an event hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency on fusion energy. The men sat together over lunch talking about Dr. Loureiro’s new role, where he was heavily involved in raising funds to advance research on nuclear fusion and plasma.
“He told me he was doing a lot of management and was searching for research funding,” Dr. Gonçalves recalled. “He was joking that he didn’t have enough time for theory and modeling.”
Despite Dr. Loureiro’s shift to management, it was his teaching that left the strongest impression on Dr. Gonçalves.
“He was the kind of guy who went up to the chalkboard and started writing out equations and explaining everything,” he said. “The students loved it. He was like an Einstein without the crazy hair.”
Daphné Anglès contributed research from Paris.
Azam Ahmed is international investigative correspondent for The Times. He has reported on Wall Street scandals, the War in Afghanistan and violence and corruption in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
The post Portuguese Colleagues Laud Slain Professor, but Don’t Recall Suspect appeared first on New York Times.
