MIT Grad Student Kaitlin Goldstein Plunges to Death During Jog in India

Kaitlin Goldstein

By Rachel X. Landes June 23, 2014

A Jewish graduate student at MIT fell off a cliff and died June 14 while running in a mountainous area of northern India, where she had just arrived for a program on energy and development.

Kaitlin Goldstein, 28, of Rhode Island, apparently slipped on loose rocks and fell several hundred feet off a cliff while on a morning run.

Goldstein was in the process of completing her PhD in architecture at MIT. She had arrived in Ladakh, a remote region in northern India, on June 7 to complete a program on energy and development. After the program, she had intended to stay and help install solar panels at a Buddhist monastery.

Goldstein was last seen going for a morning run around dawn. Students and instructors were quickly alerted to her disappearance and began the search. Goldstein’s parents flew to India to assist the investigation.

Her body was found last Saturday.

In a statement to the MIT community, President L. Rafael Reif said in an e-mail, “As Kate’s family and friends bear this sorrow, we offer them the sympathy and support of the MIT community. The death of someone so young and promising is a terrible loss; we should all take time to reach out to those around us.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO