Liviu Librescu
| Liviu Librescu | |
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| Born | Liviu Librescu August 18, 1930 Ploiești, Kingdom of Romania |
| Died | April 16, 2007 (aged 76) Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S. |
| Citizenship | Israel United States |
| Fields | Engineering |
| Institutions |
Virginia Tech Tel Aviv University Technion |
| Alma mater | Politehnica University of Bucharest |
| Known for | Research in aeroelasticity and aerodynamics |
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Part of a series of articles on the Virginia Tech shooting |
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Liviu Librescu (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈlivju liˈbresku]; Hebrew: ליביו ליברסקו; August 18, 1930 – April 16, 2007) was a Romanian-American scientist and engineer. A prominent academic in addition to being a survivor of the Holocaust, his major research fields were aeroelasticity and aerodynamics.
Librescu is most widely known for his actions during the Virginia Tech shooting, when he held the doors to his lecture hall closed, allowing all but one of his students enough time to escape through the windows. Shot and killed during the attack, Librescu was posthumously awarded the Order of the Star of Romania, the country's highest civilian honor.
At the time of his death, he was Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Tech.
Liviu Librescu was born in 1930 to a Jewish family in the city of Ploiești, Romania. After Romania allied with Nazi Germany in World War II, his family was deported to a labor camp in Transnistria, and later, along with thousands of other Jews, was deported to a ghetto in the Romanian city of Focșani. His wife, Marlena, who is also a Holocaust survivor, told Israeli Channel 10 TV the day after his death, "We were in Romania during the Second World War, and we were Jews there among the Germans, and among the anti-Semitic Romanians." Dorothea Weisbuch, a cousin of Librescu living in Romania, said in an interview to Romanian newspaper Cotidianul: "He was an extraordinarily gifted person and very altruistic. When he was little, he was very curious and knew everything, so that I thought he would become very conceited, but it did not happen so; he was of a rare modesty."
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