Mameet P. Khanolkar of Bombay, India, who received the M.Eng. in civil and environmental engineering in June, collapsed near his sister's apartment in Waltham Monday and died in Deaconess Waltham Hospital.
Mr. Khanolkar, who was 24 years old, was discovered at about 4:30 p.m. on Stearns Hill Road by a passerby, who called 911. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance and pronounced dead at 5:37 p.m. The cause of death was massive acute pulmonaric embolism, according to an autopsy report provided to the family.
Mr. Khanolkar had been living with his sister and her husband at Windsor Village Apartments since graduation. He was awaiting a work permit in order to start a job as an information technology consultant in Cambridge.
Mr. Khanolkar and Rachna Jotwani, a graduate student in computer science at the State University of New York/Buffalo, planned to marry in India in February. At the time of his death, she was in India planning the wedding.
Mr. Khanolkar, who was born in Mumbai, India, on December 13, 1976, earned the B.E. in chemical engineering from Mumbai University in 1998. He worked as a project engineer in India before he matriculated at MIT in September, 2000. While an undergraduate at Mumbai, he played cricket, table tennis, lawn tennis and badminton.
"He loved cricket," said Sebastian Boegerhausen of McLean, Va., who worked with Mr. Khanolkar on the IT group in the M.Eng. program. "He taught me about the game and we watched matches together on the Internet." Mr. Khanolkar was his mentor in other areas as well. "When I had a question he'd work it out and give me the answer," said Mr. Boegershausen, who also received the M.Eng. last June. "It came to a point where I could look at a program and figure it out just because he was there with me. He was my best friend at MIT."
In addition to his sister, Meghana, Mr. Khanolkar is survived by his parents, Prafull and Nayana Khanolkar of Bombay. The funeral will be in India.
"He was a wonderful person," said Arun Ghosh, Mr. Khanolkar's brother-in-law. "He will be missed very much."
