Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro is Director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Herman Feshbach (1942) Professor of Physics at MIT. He majored in Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon (Portugal) in 2000 and obtained a Ph.D. in Physics at Imperial College London (UK) in 2005. He did post-doctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory between 2005-07, and at the UKAEA Culham Centre for Fusion Energy between 2007-09. Prior to joining MIT in 2016 Loureiro was a researcher at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion at IST Lisbon.
Loureiro has an active interest in several fundamental aspects of magnetized plasma dynamics, such as magnetic reconnection, magnetic field generation and amplification, confinement and transport in fusion plasmas, and turbulence in strongly magnetized, weakly collisional plasmas.
Prof. Loureiro’s group uses a combination of analytical theory and state-of-the art simulations to investigate several topics in nonlinear plasma dynamics, particularly magnetic reconnection, turbulence and instabilities. He also has an active interest in novel computational techniques for plasma simulation, including machine learning and quantum computing.
22.612, Intro to Plasma Physics II
22.611, Intro to Plasma Physics I
22.615, MHD