A Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student who went missing more than a week ago in northern India was found dead Saturday after she allegedly slipped while jogging and fell several hundred feet off a cliff, MIT officials confirmed.
Kaitlin Goldstein, 28, of Providence, Rhode Island, was reported to have gone missing in a remote region of northern India, known as Ladakh, after she went for an early morning run up a mountain trail on June 14.
When she failed to return, students and instructors at the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh began looking for her immediately. The search grew to include local police, the Intelligence Bureau of India, the American embassy in New Delhi, the U.S. State Department and the FBI being part of the search, with MIT hiring a private security firm based in Mumbai.
Her body was eventually discovered Saturday in a ravine below the trail she was reportedly jogging on. Her parents, who went to India to look for their daughter, told MIT officials that she apparently slipped on some loose rock before falling off the cliff, the Associated Press reported. She was known to be a competitive runner.
Goldstein was working on a doctorate in architecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts before arriving in India on June 7 to take part in a workshop on energy and development on the campus of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh near the city of Leh.
The workshop, organized by the MIT-affiliated Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, was scheduled to have her stay back after it was completed and provide her services to install solar panels at a nearby Buddhist monastery, MIT officials said.
Members of the MIT community were notified about Goldstein's death through an email by MIT President L. Rafal Reif on Saturday, in addition to counseling services on campus.
"She was passionately interested in energy solutions for the developing world, a subject she was exploring in a remote region of northern India at the time of her death," Reif wrote. "The death of someone so young and promising is a terrible loss; we should all take time to reach out to those around us."
