Graduate student Kaitlin Goldstein dies after falling off cliff in India
UPDATE TO THIS ARTICLE: Sarah Shechtman, a childhood friend of Goldstein’s, has created the “Kindness for Kate Project” in her memory. “I want to encourage small, or even big acts of kindness in honor of my best friend,” Shechtman wrote in a blog post announcing the start of the project. “That's what she would have wanted and that's what I want to give her. She gave everyone she knew so much just by being kind and going above and beyond to help people.” More information can be found at kindness4kate.blogspot.com.
Kaitlin R. Goldstein, a fourth-year doctoral student in architecture, has been found dead a week after she went missing in northern India, MIT said on Sunday. She was 28.
While on an early-morning run in the mountains, she had apparently slipped and fallen hundreds of feet off a cliff, her parents told MIT.
Goldstein’s body was found last Saturday in a ravine, MIT said, ending a search that had involved her parents, local police, a private Mumbai security firm hired by MIT, India’s Intelligence Bureau, the U.S. embassy in India, the U.S. state department, and the FBI.
“The death of someone so young and promising is a terrible loss; we should all take time to reach out to those around us,” President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to the MIT community.
Goldstein was scheduled to install off-grid solar panels at a Buddhist monastery.
She had spent the week of June 8 participating in a workshop on energy and development hosted on the campus of the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh, near the town of Leh, and organized by the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT and the MIT-affiliated Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi.
Goldstein was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, and a graduate of Brown University.
Her brother, Adam Goldstein, told WPRI-TV in Providence that she was “very caring and very smart” and “really passionate about helping poorer places out.”
Goldstein’s death is the third among graduate students at MIT since March.
Information about MIT’s mental health services and resources for support can be found at http://together.mit.edu.