This past week’s tragic and violent events in Rhode Island and Massachusetts have left us, just like everyone else in the Portuguese-American communities, deeply impacted and shocked. FLAD has had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with both Brown University and MIT.

Besides our decades-long support for visiting professorships at Brown’s Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, Prof. Nuno Loureiro was a FLAD grantee who received funding from FLAD at a very early stage in his brilliant career; in this case, to attend a meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics in Utah. More recently, FLAD supported a PhD student who worked in Prof. Nuno Loureiro’s group at MIT.

FLAD shares its deepest sympathies with the families, friends and colleagues who lost three brilliant lives that had so much to offer the world. This tragedy makes us more determined than ever to continue our mission building bridges of understanding and mutual benefit between Portugal and the USA; through education, science & technology, transatlantic relations, and the arts.