Key Highlights
- Only one was willing to go on the record, but several others expressed similar opinions. Valente was described as brilliant and competitive, but willing to help his colleagues out.
- He finished top of his class, with an average grade of 19 out of 20, an unusually high score for Técnico.
- Loureiro, who was said to be an excellent student but more easygoing than Valente, finished with an average grade of 16 out of 20. Classmates say that, at the time, the two men appeared socially well adjusted. The MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro was killed last week.
- ake Belcher/APNuno Morais, 48, now a researcher at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine in Lisbon, said he and his fellow classmates, shaken by the news of Loureiro’s killing, had been “racking their brains” for any signs that something was wrong.“Having known Cláudio and having had a good relationship with him, we can’t find any other explanation than a serious mental health problem – exacerbated by resentment for not having achieved the academic career he dreamed of,” he said. Soon after his graduation in Lisbon, Valente enrolled at Brown University as a promising young doctoral student of physics, but dropped out after a few months in early 2001 and returned to Portugal to work as a programmer for an internet provider. Loureiro studied at Imperial College London and then Princeton University, later working at the UK’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy.
- He joined MIT in 2016 as a professor of nuclear science and engineering, eventually becoming the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the institute. Valente and Loureiro’s classmates said they suspected that the highly competitive atmosphere of academia may have taken a mental toll.“I don’t remember any specific situations directly involving Nuno and Cláudio during our graduate degree, but the culture in these schools remains the same – a hyper-competitive environment where students who struggle are humiliated and made to feel they can only succeed if they are the best of the best,” said Morais. A memorial for the shooting victims at Brown University.
