What we know about the six victims who died in a N.Y. plane crash
Here's what we know about the victims.
Advertisement
Karenna Groff
To those who knew her, Karenna J. Groff was a 'dynamo.'
While starting for MIT's soccer team for four years, Groff also worked with Dr. Mustafa Sahin at Boston Children's Hospital, searching for a genetic understanding — and possible cures — for epilepsy.
In her fifth year at the lab, Groff, who grew up in Weston, earned her master's degree and completed her dissertation. Based on her dissertation,
Advertisement
'She was someone that was brilliant as a student,' Sahin said. 'She had this incredible work ethic of testing and retesting things until she convinced herself of the validity of her results. So if you got some data from her you knew it was something could count on … She had a real passion for scientific inquiry so it was easy to see the potential that she had.'
Groff was chosen as the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year, the highest honor from the college athletic association for her on-field and off-field career at MIT.
She followed her academic successes at MIT with admission to New York University Medical School's highly selective program for accelerated study in neuroscience.
Dr. E. Antonio Chiocca, who worked with her Groff's father, Dr. Michael Groff, at Mass General Brigham, said the NYU program pays for medical school and guarantees training as a resident if the student can handle the academic challenge. Karenna Groff had succeeded once again and was scheduled to begin residency in neurosurgery — the same medical field as her father — this summer, he said.
'She was a dynamo,' said Chiocca, who got to know Karenna while she attended Weston High School and spent time with his children. 'She was always on the go …. It just came natural to her. [Her father] knew that she was going to go places. … She wanted to be a neurosurgeon like her dad.'
Michael Groff
Michael W. Groff was at ease in the operating room and when operating the controls of planes, according to relatives, a colleague, and federal records.
The statement said Groff was an experienced pilot who fell in love with flying after his father taught him how when he was 16.
Advertisement
It appears Groff was piloting the Mitsubishi twin engine aircraft when it crashed in rural New York State on Saturday, according to a profile of the pilot outlined by the NTSB on Sunday.
'He was a great pilot. I mean, I've been on planes with him,' said Chiocca. 'He started flying when he was a teenager that flew planes. His dad flew planes ... I just can't imagine that he could even get into a crash.'
Chiocca also knew Groff in the operating room. Chiocca is chair of neurosurgery at Mass General Brigham where Groff was vice chair until last summer. They started working together in 2011, he said.
'We like to say he was a doctor's doctor,' Chiocca said. 'Just a consummate, consummate technical surgeon."
Groff wanted to take on a leadership role and last summer joined Rochester Regional Health as executive medical director of neurosciences in the nine-hospital organization.
He was also studying for an executive MBA at MIT's Sloan School of Management, the university said.
He graduated in 1993 from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine where met Dr. Jyot Saini, who became his wife and the mother of their three children. She was known as Joy.
Groff underwent further training at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in neurological surgery and then at the Medical School of Wisconsin, according to the Board of Registration in Medicine.
Groff was also a member of a national medical group for neuroscience, which allowed him to develop friendships across his field.
'He was very well thought of, highly regarded by people around the country,' Chiocca said.
Advertisement
Chiocca said he met all of the Groff family over the years.
'Just a really nice guy, great family man,' he said. 'Just an amazing individual. Just really a great loss for all of us. This is tragic.'
This 2024 photo provided by John Santoro shows, from left, Dr. Michael Groff, Karenna Groff, Dr. Joy Saini, and James Santoro.
Uncredited/Associated Press
Joy Saini
Karenna Groff's mother, Joy Saini, was born in Punjab, India, and immigrated to the United States with her parents, according to a family statement.
Saini went on to become an accomplished pelvic surgeon and the founder of
Saini trained in medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where she met Michael Groff, the statement said.
Jared Groff
Karenna's brother, Jared Groff, graduated from Swarthmore College in 2022 and worked as a paralegal, according to a family statement.
Groff studied economics and political science at Swarthmore and worked at DW Partners in New York. He was weighing law school acceptances for the fall, the statement said.
This 2023 photo provided by John Santoro shows his son, James Santoro, and Karenna Groff, a former MIT soccer player recently named the NCAA Woman of Year.
Uncredited/Associated Press
James Santoro
James Santoro, Karenna Groff's boyfriend, was also a recent MIT graduate, earning a bachelor's degree in finance in 2022. They met when they were MIT freshmen, and Santoro planned to propose to Groff this summer, his father, John Santoro, told the Associated Press.
'They were a wonderful family,' he told the AP. 'The world lost a lot of very good people who were going to do a lot of good for the world if they had the opportunity. We're all personally devastated.'
James's mother, Lisa Santoro, said he had recently bought an engagement ring for Groff.
Santoro grew up in Tewksbury, N.J., and was a graduate of the Delbarton School, John Santoro said.
Advertisement
James was a joyful son who was 'determined to become a good man,' which he succeeded in, his mother said.
'He loved deeply, laughed easily, and lived life to the fullest. Nothing was better than being enveloped in one of his big hugs. Nothing will be better than being his mother,' Lisa said in an email statement.
His sister, Caroline Santoro, who lives and works in New York City, said James was a loving older brother.
'I loved James from the moment I was born, I loved growing up with him, and I will spend the rest of my life loving him and living in his memory,' Caroline, 23, said in an email.
Jared Groff and Alexia Couyutas Duarte were both graduates of Swarthmore College. They died in a plane crash near Craryville, N.Y. on Saturday, April 12.
Couyutas Duarte Family
Alexia Couyutas Duarte
Alexia Couyutas Duarte, Jared Groff's partner, also graduated Swarthmore and planned to attend Harvard Law School this fall.
Alexia Couyutas Duarte had lived with the Groff family for the past year in Weston, and loved being in the Boston area, her sister Maria Claudia Couyutas Duarte said.
Alexia had long dreamt of studying at Harvard Law School, and attended an admitted students event the day before the plane crash, her sister said. Alexia hoped to one day become a judge.
'If you think about it, it was almost like she was living her perfect life,' said Maria Claudia, 30, who lives in Orlando, Fla.
Alexia was 24 and one of four siblings raised by a single mother in Miami, her sister said.
'My sister was all about paying tribute to my mom's hard work and really using everything, all the resources she had, to her advantage to be the best she could be,' her sister said. 'We always say here at home that she wanted to eat the world up.'
Advertisement
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
John R. Ellement can be reached at
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Bloomberg
Harvard AIDS Research, Affiliated Hospitals Hit by Trump Feud
The Trump administration's funding battle with Harvard University is starting to impact projects at affiliated hospitals and has crippled the school's Center for AIDS Research, one of the largest backers in the US for emerging studies on the condition. Harvard funnels a portion of its federal grants to research partners, including the Mass General Brigham hospital system, and that money has now largely stopped flowing after the government froze more than $2.6 billion in support. Mass General researchers whose work is affected should 'stop all activity and spending' unless they have found alternative funding, Paul Anderson, the hospital group's chief academic officer, said in a message to staff late last week.
Business Wire
2 days ago
- Business Wire
Phare Bio and MIT Named to Fast Company 's 2025 World Changing Ideas List
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Fast Company has named Phare Bio, a biotech social venture, and MIT's Collins Lab, to its 2025 World Changing Ideas list for their breakthrough use of generative AI to design entirely novel antibiotics – a paradigm-shifting approach in the global fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Phare Bio and the Collins Lab's generative AI platform marks a significant leap forward in drug discovery, enabling researchers to design antibiotics in silico with unprecedented precision and speed. By layering multiple drug parameters into the design process – such as reducing toxicity or improving oral bioavailability – the platform can produce tailored antibiotic candidates with real-world clinical relevance. This year's recognition follows a major milestone in September 2024, when Phare Bio and the Collins Lab received an up to $27 million grant from ARPA-H to enhance this generative AI design capability and build a pipeline of 15 novel antibiotics tailored to meet global public health needs. 'We believe generative AI is not just accelerating drug discovery – it's redefining what's possible,' said Dr. Akhila Kosaraju, CEO and President of Phare Bio. 'To be named to Fast Company's World Changing Ideas list is an incredible honor, and a reflection of what happens when breakthrough science, technology and a commitment to real-world impact converge.' Building off of the Collins Lab's first-ever discovery of a novel antibiotic using AI, Phare Bio's goal is simple and urgent: to design smarter antibiotics for the patients who need them most. 'This recognition is deeply meaningful for Phare Bio and our lab at MIT,' said Dr. Jim Collins, Co-founder of Phare Bio, Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. 'Over the past decade, our team has worked at the forefront of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to chart a new era in antibiotic discovery. We're excited to see this work scale into a global movement to reinvigorate antibiotic innovation.' 'The World Changing Ideas Awards have always been about showcasing the art of the possible,' says Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief at Fast Company. 'We're proud to recognize the organizations and leaders that are making meaningful progress on the biggest issues of our time.' By combining deep learning, data-driven design, and open-access collaboration, Phare Bio and the Collins Lab are creating a new gold standard for how antibiotics are discovered and developed. About Phare Bio Phare Bio is a social venture using artificial intelligence (AI) to develop novel classes of antibiotics in partnership with Jim Collins' lab at MIT. Founded in 2020 to address the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance, Phare Bio is a recipient of the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative between TED and leading nonprofits to support bold solutions to global challenges. The company combines cutting-edge machine learning with world-class science to accelerate the discovery of urgently needed antibiotics. To learn more, visit or email info@
Forbes
2 days ago
- Forbes
Alphafold 3 Extends Modeling Capacity To More Biological Targets
Doctor working on digital tablet with medical interface and digital healthcare and network concept. The people behind the original protein modeling tool Alphafold have now developed a newer version, Alphafold 3, which is changing the way that this fundamental technology works. Looking at the changes in the newest version, you find that Alphafold 3 extends to a broader spectrum of molecular structures, including ligands (ions or molecules with certain binding properties) and other ions, as well as something called 'post-translational modifications' – (here's the Wikipedia entry.) Additionally, Alphafold 3 uses a reformed 'Pairformer' architecture to process pairwise relationships (more on that later) - it has better prediction accuracy, and improved performance in making some types of predictions. (Here's more from NIH). The original Alphafold technology earned its makers, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis, a Nobel prize, and now these tools are still redefining what it means to do drug discovery. So how does Alphafold work for big drug companies? In a TED talk explaining some of this commercial success, Lauren Davis, someone with MIT ties, shows us a bit of how this works, helping companies to come up with life-saving medicines. Davis points to a 'transformative' process where new tools enable rapid development, on a more efficient framework. One aspect of this, she points out, is target identification – predicting the structure of a given target. That way, companies can sidestep some of the human and animal testing that's expensive and labor-intensive, not to mention sensitive. She compares the system to a dating app, where you narrow down potential matches before proceeding with actual testing, which would be analogous to meeting someone for a date (read: investing time and effort.) She talks about the process of scoring potential inhibitors, which she says she's excited about because she used to be on the MIT soccer team. In general, Davis paints a picture of how Alphafold actually applies in the commercial world. That's a little bit about the way is that Alphafold is contributing to the medical community. But there's another feature of this new model that I was interested in, and I ended up getting different results from different LLM models, so let's look at that a bit: If you ask ChatGPT whether Alphafold 3 is open source, you get this - at least, I did: '(Alphqafold 3 is) not open-sourced; instead, it is accessible through a cloud-based platform provided by DeepMind for non-commercial research purposes. This approach has elicited some concerns within the scientific community regarding transparency and accessibility.' As a source, the model lists this Wired article. However, when I looked at a post from Dario Amodei from November of last year, I found this, suggesting, albeit in a terse way, that Alphafold 3 has become open source: 'AI protein prediction tool, AlphaFold3, is open source.' Now, when I asked Copilot the same thing, as a result of typing a search into Bing, it gave me this: 'Not fully open source - AlphaFold 3 is not fully open source. While the source code and model weights are available for academic use under specific non-commercial restrictions, access to the model weights is limited to those with academic affiliations. This means that while researchers can use the software for non-commercial applications, they cannot freely access the training weights for commercial use.' And there were a number of sources listed. So the most likely answer, based on all of that input, is that Alphafold 3 is 'sort of' open source – that is, as Copilot said, that some of the weights and other aspects are public, but other aspects of the technology are not. ChatGPT contends, above, that the cloud-based platform that Alphafold 3 is on is 'maintained by DeepMind for non-commercial research purposes.' Anyway, in this case, we don't really have to guess: just check the GitHub for the new version. But this shows how you can get different information from different models, something we are going to have to learn to navigate. In any case, this new version of Alphafold continues the tradition of giving us new tools for drug discovery. Davis, in her talk, used the example of lisinopril as an ACE inhibitor, and explained how the Alphafold process can apply to predicting and modeling how an inhibitor will work. Practically, we have millions and millions of Americans on these drugs, and they apply to a wide scope of health conditions, so it's abundantly useful to take advantage of AI in these ways. Will it lower the cost of drugs? We'll see.
