Dec 16, 2025 - Politics & Policy

Police launch homicide investigation into MIT professor shot at home

Julianna Bragg

The MIT building dome on the school's lawn — The Great Dome on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus. Photo: Cassandra Klos/Bloomberg/Getty Images

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor's shooting death at his home near Boston is being treated as a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

The big picture: Nuno Gomes Loureiro, 47, a nuclear science and engineering professor, was taken to a hospital Monday evening with "apparent gunshot wounds" and died Tuesday morning, the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office said on social media.

"This is an active and ongoing homicide investigation," the district attorney's office said. "No further information is being released at this time."

What we're watching: Officials did not immediately say whether a suspect had been taken into custody.

Context: Loureiro was originally from Portugal and majored in physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon in 2000 and received his Ph.D. in physics at Imperial College London in 2005, per his faculty profile.

He joined MIT in 2016 and was named the director of the school's Plasma Science and Fusion Center just last year.

What they're saying: Brookline Police Department Chief Jennifer Paster in a statement expressing her condolences to Loureiro's loved ones said she's "limited in the information we can share at this time" in "order to protect the integrity of the investigation."

Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America professor of engineering at MIT, said Loureiro "shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader, and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner," per MIT News.

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Police launch homicide investigation into MIT professor shot at home

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