Rate My Professor Nuno Loureiro

Nuno F. G. Loureiro was Professor of Physics and Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the MIT faculty in 2016 and was granted tenure in 2017. He was appointed the Herman Feshbach (1942) Professor of Physics and served as director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, having previously been deputy director of the center beginning in 2022. Loureiro obtained an MEng in Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Imperial College London in 2005. Prior to joining MIT, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the UKAEA Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, and from 2009 he served as a principal investigator at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion at IST Lisbon.

A theoretical physicist and fusion scientist, Loureiro’s research focused on fundamental aspects of magnetized plasma dynamics, including magnetic reconnection, magnetic field generation and amplification, confinement and transport in fusion plasmas, and turbulence in strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas. He received the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society in 2015, the ANS Faculty PAI Outstanding Professor award in 2017, and the NSF CAREER award in 2017. Loureiro contributed to the academic field through his work on plasma physics and fusion science at MIT.