Still no word on causes of 2 grad student deaths
HST student Eliana Hechter remembered
Courtesy of George Bergman, Berkeley
MIT announced the death of Eliana F. Hechter, a first-year medical student at Harvard and MIT’s joint Health Sciences and Technology program, last Friday.
A former Rhodes Scholar, Hechter held a doctoral degree in statistics from the University of Oxford, according to her CV.
“We encourage students, administration, and faculty to come together as a community to remember Eliana as a student with tremendous promise, and one who has been lost far too soon,” a letter from several HST faculty and staff members read.
MIT did not say when or how she died. The causes of the deaths of both Hechter and Hadi Kasab, the MIT graduate student who was found dead in March, were still unannounced at press time.
A spokesman for the Massachusetts medical examiner said that Hechter’s and Kasab’s autopsies were still “pending.”
A spokeswoman for the Middlesex district attorney said that neither case was “believed to be suspicious.”
The Daily Star, a newspaper based in Beirut, reported in March that Kasab had been buried in his hometown of Kfar Shuba, Lebanon. Still, Terrel Harris, the spokesman for the medical examiner, said that Kasab’s autopsy required “additional testing” that could take several more weeks.
The letter from the HST faculty and staff members said that those in need of support could turn to MIT Medical’s mental health and counseling services, MIT’s chaplains, or the graduate education dean’s office.