Cause of death of Professor Seth Teller is released

UPDATE TO THIS ARTICLE: The chief of MIT's mental health services, Alan Siegel, has written a letter regarding recent deaths of MIT community members.

Professor Seth Teller’s death last Tuesday has been ruled a suicide, according to Terrel Harris, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner’s Office. The cause of death was listed as “blunt trauma to head and torso.”

Teller was 50 when he died on July 1. In an email to the MIT community last week, President L. Rafael Reif said he “knew Seth as a person of great human warmth and intellectual intensity.”

Teller was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and led the Robotics, Vision, and Sensor Networks group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“He cared deeply about his students as people first, which was welcome relief at MIT,” wrote Paul Hemberger, a current EECS graduate student at MIT, in the comments section of the MIT News Office’s obituary.

In a class on assistive technologies, Teller “guided us along with his incredible breadth of knowledge and caring spirit,” Hemberger continued. “I know many students have been inspired to continue working in this field because of his teaching.”

Information about MIT’s support services can be found at http://together.mit.edu.