PATTERN RECOGNITION

I. Nuno Loureiro was born in Viseu, a small city in central Portugal, in 1977. As MIT's president Sally Kornbluth would later write about him, even as a little boy, "when everyone else wanted to be a policeman or a fireman," Nuno already wanted to be a scientist. He studied physics in Lisbon at Instituto Superior Técnico, then earned his doctorate at Imperial College London, then did postdoctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and at the UKAEA Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. He joined MIT's faculty in 2016, was granted tenure in 2017, and was named director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, MIT's largest lab—in 2024. His specialty was magnetic reconnection: the process by which oppositely-directed magnetic field lines in a plasma break apart and snap back together, converting stored magnetic energy into kinetic energy with tremendous, sudden violence. Magnetic reconnection is responsible for solar flares, the largest explosions in the solar system,…