Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

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

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.”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.