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OAN Staff Blake Wolf
3:29 PM – Friday, December 26, 2025
A top Portuguese nuclear fusion official claims that the suspected gunman responsible for the murder of an MIT scientist and two Brown University students may have acted out of spite due to never reaching the same level of success as his former classmate, according to a Daily Mail report.
The shooting took place on December 13th on the campus of Brown University, Claudio Neves-Valente, the suspected gunman, allegedly shot and killed two university students while injuring nine others, according to authorities.
Neves-Valente is also believed to have also shot and killed world-renowned Portuguese fusion-energy researcher and MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center director Nuno Loureiro two days later at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 15th.
Neves-Valente, once thought of as one of Portugal’s most promising scientific talents, was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit days after the murder of Loureiro.
The suspected killer studied with Loureiro in Lisbon in the late 1990s, before Neves-Valente later dropped out of Brown University, derailing his academic trajectory.
Loureiro, however, went on to achieve massive success, resulting in his designation of director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024.
According to Dr. Bruno Goncalves, the president of Portugal’s Institute of Plasma and Nuclear Fusion where both Neves-Valente and Loureiro were students, Neves-Valente is not believed to have kept in contact with Loureiro.
In his youth, Neves-Valente was regarded by teachers and peers as a prodigy, leading to his selection for the national physics competition and his representation of Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad in Canberra in 1995.
“He was extraordinary,” a former teacher told the Daily Mail. “The kind of student you remember for life.”
“Claudio was known as the best student of his year,” Goncalves recalled, going on to note that Neves-Valente “graduated with 19 out of 20” at the Institute of Plasma and Nuclear Fusion.
“Claudio was the best,” he continued. “It was not even a competition. They had lectures together, but not the same practical groups. They were not directly competing.”
After graduating from the program, Neves-Valente moved to the United States and enrolled in Brown University’s PhD program in physics, only to drop out roughly a year later due to becoming “disillusioned” with the program, prompting his return to Portugal.
Neves-Valente went on to become estranged from his parents for more than two decades, working as a computer scientist at SAPO, a Portuguese tech firm, from 2006 to 2013.
“He was always a little strange,” a former colleague told the outlet. “But we put that down to his intelligence. He could spend hours debating philosophy.”
Meanwhile, Loureiro went on to complete his PhD at Imperial College London before working at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, and the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion’s research unit, before ultimately ending up at MIT.
In the interview with the Daily Mail, Goncalves suggested that Loureiro’s success may have been a motivating factor in the murder.
“The strongest theory is that Claudio saw Nuno as a symbol of the academic and professional success that he himself had failed to achieve.”
“This wasn’t a rivalry that grew between two people,” Goncalves continued. “It grew inside one person.”
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“In the end, it may be jealousy, envy – someone that had a mental illness, seeing someone that achieved what you would like to achieve, and had the skills to achieve, but never made it,” he added. “It’s a bitterness around probably his own decisions.”
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