Brown U Shooter Physics Major

[Yancy Derringer]

Another one of those zany physics types up to no good again. At least he only shot the poor girl in the face, and didn't rape and dismember her like they do at UIUC.

Brown shooting suspect attended 3 semesters, did not receive degree, says university president

...
“Neves Valente was admitted to Brown’s Graduate School to study in the Sc.M-PhD program in physics,” the statement read, noting he was enrolled from Fall 2000 to Spring 2001. He then took a leave of absence and formally withdrew from the university effective July 31, 2003. 

“During his time at Brown, Neves Valente was enrolled only in physics classes, and it is likely that he would have taken courses and spent time in Barus & Holley,” Paxson said, referring to the building where the shooting took place.

[WilliamW]

Another one of those zany physics types up to no good again. At least he only shot the poor girl in the face, and didn't rape and dismember her like they do at UIUC.

Definitely a chicken/egg conundrum. Is there something about physics that makes people socially awkward and violent, or do socially awkward and violent people congregate in the Physics Department?

Speaking of which -- not that he has anything (that we know of) to do with this incident -- now that Physics genius George "Sphincter" Gollin has been retired, he would seem to have even more spare time to indulge his anti-social fantasies, and there's no campus police around to pretend like they are monitoring him. If he deems his food options to be subpar will he finally reach his breaking point?

Two Young Physicists Seemed Destined for Greatness. Two Decades Later, One Shot the Other Dead.

Claudio Neves Valente, the suspect in the Brown and MIT shootings, had flashes of temper; former classmates describe him as confrontational and socially awkward

By Jared Mitovich, Neil Mehta, Deborah Acosta, and Douglas Belkin
Dec. 19, 2025 9:34 pm ET

Twenty-five years ago, two promising physicists graduated from a prestigious science university in Lisbon. On Monday, one gunned the other down at his home outside Boston after firing on a classroom of Brown University undergrads, authorities say.

Claudio Neves Valente, the suspected shooter, once had a bright future. He graduated at the top of his college class, ahead of classmate Nuno Loureiro. But by the time Neves Valente confronted Loureiro at his Brookline, Mass., apartment building this past week, Loureiro’s career had soared while Neves Valente’s withered.

Loureiro was an acclaimed nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leading one of its largest labs. Neves Valente had been living in an unassuming home in Miami, far from the academic grandeur for which he’d once seemed destined.

Investigators don’t know why Neves Valente opened fire in the Brown classroom, nor what drove him to target Loureiro. After a six-day manhunt, police found Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in New Hampshire Thursday night.


The storage facility in New Hampshire where Neves Valente, suspected of killing two
Brown University students and an MIT professor, was found dead this week.

“I don’t think we have any idea why now, or why Brown, why these students, why this classroom. That is really unknown to us,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha at a press briefing.

Neves Valente was born in the Portuguese town of Torres Novas, about 70 miles north of Lisbon. As a teenager, he was selected to represent Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad, according to the Portugal Physics Gazette. The wife of one of his teachers told local media that the teacher considered him his best student.

In 1995, he enrolled at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico to pursue a physics degree. So did Nuno Loureiro. While multiple professors and a classmate at the Portugal engineering school recalled Loureiro fondly, Neves Valente didn’t leave strong impressions socially.

One professor at University of Lisbon who taught Neves Valente as an undergraduate told Publico, a newspaper in Lisbon, that he had a confrontational personality in class. Other students would ask questions, he said, but Neves Valente liked to say that he knew the answers.

In online forum messages from 1997 from what appears to be Neves Valente’s then-college email address, he signs off with a quote attributed to Nietzsche: “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

In 1999, Neves Valente took an optional class in quantum field theory and earned a near-perfect grade of 19 out of 20, professor Jorge Romão said after reviewing old paperwork. The class had only 15 students, but Romão said he had no memory of Neves Valente.

He excelled academically and served as a teaching assistant. In 2000, he came to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies at Brown, where acquaintances say he struggled to adjust.


Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico.
Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images

Scott Watson, now a physics professor at Syracuse University, said he was essentially Neves Valente’s only friend at Brown. Both socially awkward, Watson approached him sitting alone at orientation and said hello. The two grew close, Watson said, recalling fond memories of dinners with him at a local Portuguese restaurant.

Neves Valente had an impressive intellect but often became frustrated, “sometimes angry,” about life at Brown, Watson said. He complained the classes were too easy—he already knew most of the material—and the food options were subpar. He expressed particular irritation about the lack of high-quality fish, Watson said.

Neves Valente had flashes of temper. Watson recalled once having to break up a fight between him and a classmate whom Neves Valente had called his “slave.”

Ben Schrag, then a graduate student who was Valente’s senior while the two were at Brown, occasionally saw him on campus and said he often seemed frustrated and unhappy. Many students in the program, he said, were awkward and kept busy with coursework. “All of the physics grad students were introverted and stressed out,” he said.

Carlos Vicente, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, was another physics graduate student with Valente. He remembers he’d often receive Neves Valente’s mail because of their similar names. When they occasionally interacted, Neves Valente was soft-spoken, nonthreatening and otherwise forgettable, Vicente said.


Mourners gather outside the home of Nuno Loureiro, the acclaimed nuclear scientist at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was shot and killed this past week.
Leah Willingham/AP

“You’d forget about him after talking to him for five or six minutes, you know?” he said.

In the spring of 2001, Neves Valente took a leave of absence from Brown and later formally withdrew.

Nuno Morais, a college classmate, told Publico, the Lisbon newspaper, that after Neves Valente left Brown he returned to Portugal, where he worked for an internet-services provider and a telecom company. Some former classmates are speculating about his mental health and whether he envied Loureiro’s successful career.

In 2017, Neves Valente came back to the U.S. through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program and was given a green card.

His last known address is in Florida, a small yellow home in Ives Estates, a middle-class neighborhood in north Miami-Dade County. Like many single-family homes in the area, the property has been divided into multiple units where tenants can rent space by the room, according to neighbors and a current tenant.

On Friday, a tenant who moved into the property about three weeks ago said he has never seen Neves Valente. A postal worker who delivered mail in the afternoon said she has only ever met one person at the home, the owner. Someone who identified himself as the owner said via the home’s ring camera that he’d never seen Neves Valente.


Investigators haven’t determined a motive in the killing of Loureiro.
Jake Belcher/Handout/Reuters

A neighbor, Bujavi Christmas, said he was shocked to learn that the alleged gunman lived so close by. His neighborhood is the kind where you can leave your car unlocked and nothing happens. But he described the rental house as “somewhat transient.” In the eight years he has lived there, he’s seen many different people coming and going.

Sometime before December, Neves Valente left Miami for New England. On Dec. 1, he rented a car in Boston and drove to Brown’s campus in Providence, R.I., where a custodian saw him in a bathroom near the lecture hall, according to an affidavit.

Surveillance cameras recorded Neves Valente’s rental car 14 times around Providence over the next two weeks. On Dec. 13, Neves Valente again used a bathroom in the lecture hall building. This time, a witness grew suspicious because Neves Valente was wearing a mask and dark, flimsy clothing inappropriate for the cold weather.

The man followed Valente for several blocks and confronted him. Neves Valente asked: “Why are you harassing me?”

About an hour later, authorities say, Neves Valente burst into the lecture hall and started shooting, killing two students and injuring nine. The next day he checked into a Boston hotel about a half mile from the home of his old classmate, Loureiro.

On Friday morning, Vicente, Valente’s classmate from Brown, received a message from another professor about the gunman who attacked his alma mater. “What—that guy?” he thought. “I can’t believe it.”