Brown
shooting suspect: gruelling academic climate may have taken mental toll, say
ex-classmates
Cláudio
Valente and one of victims, Nuno FG Loureiro, both studied at notoriously
challenging Técnico in Lisbon
Catarina
Fernandes Martins in Lisbon
Fri 26
Dec 2025 08.00 GMT
As
investigators in Massachusetts work to piece together a motive for the murders
of two Brown University students and an MIT physics professor, former
classmates of the suspected gunman and one of the victims have been asking if
the roots of the tragedy lie in their shared experience at a top university in
Portugal.
The
suspected gunman, Cláudio Valente, and one of those killed, Nuno FG Loureiro,
studied at the prestigious and notoriously challenging University of Lisbon
engineering and technology school, known locally as Técnico, both graduating in
2000.
Contemporaries
of the two men describe the academic environment as emotionally gruelling. 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.
Nuno
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.
According
to his peers, Valente was crushed by his failure to complete his PhD.
Morais
said: “The only connection I can make with Cláudio’s trajectory and what
happened was his disappointment with the experience at Brown. Those of us who
work in academia dream of pursuing a PhD at a major American university.
Cláudio aspired to have a brilliant academic career, comparable to Nuno’s, and
this dream was prematurely destroyed, generating frustration.” .
He said
his current work included mentoring and supporting students, which had made him
aware of how normalised emotional distress and high pressure are in academia.
He said that over the years higher-education institutions such as MIT and
Caltech had taken steps to relieve student pressure because of high suicide
rates. Portugal lags on this matter, he said.
“Portuguese
schools now have therapist offices to assist students, but there’s a great
delay in fighting bullying and harassment inside the institutions. The
prevailing culture is still one in which senior figures behave in ways that are
prejudicial to mental health and that continues to be tolerated. Tragedies like
this should prompt us to think very carefully,” Morais said.
A
spokesperson for Técnico said the school was not aware of any connection
between the shootings and Valente and Loureiro’s time at the university.
“From
what we have been reading in the media, they seemed to have a normal, collegial
relationship. We are unable to see how something that happened 30 years ago can
be connected to what happened now, but the school is going to come together to
reflect and discuss,” they said.
Valente
returned to the US in 2017 through the diversity lottery immigrant visa
programme and was granted a green card. He was living in Miami.
On Friday
morning, after Valente was found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New
Hampshire, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced she had
paused the visa scheme under Trump’s direction to “ensure no more Americans are
harmed by this disastrous programme”.
“This
heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she wrote in
her social media statement.
Such
comments, and the Trump administration’s subsequent move to further narrow the
pathways to legal immigration using the crime as a pretext, caused outrage
among Valente and Loureiro’s peers.
Morais
said: “[This puts] the focus of the problem in the wrong place. Access to
weapons and the hyper-competitive culture of some universities are closer to
the root causes of these shootings than migration.”
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