Liviu Librescu

An aeronautical engineer and Holocaust survivor who spent his career studying aeroelasticity, Librescu was teaching at Virginia Tech in 2007 when a gunman reached his classroom. He held the door shut with his body, giving all but one of his students time to escape through the windows, and was shot and killed doing it. Romania later awarded him its highest civilian honor; by chance, the date of his death fell on Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.