Overview
- Thomas Rose, 37, was critically injured when his bicycle and a vehicle collided at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Massachusetts Avenue on Aug. 21 and died of his injuries on Sept. 2, MIT and local authorities said.
- Cambridge police say the driver remained at the scene and the Middlesex district attorney’s office is investigating the Aug. 21 crash, with no charges reported in the coverage to date.
- Rose joined MIT in January as the POSCO Professor of Materials Science and was preparing to open his lab and teach his first courses this fall; his work combined archaeometallurgy, geochemistry and materials science.
- Colleagues and students described Rose as a generous mentor and a collaborative researcher whose loss has left the department and international archaeological sciences community grieving.
- The collision renewed calls from Cambridge Bicycle Safety and others for permanent engineering changes on Memorial Drive, a corridor identified by state analysis as a bicycle crash cluster and site of multiple recent fatalities.