Construction Crash Kills HMS Grad

Michael T. Ty, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and neurology resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, died in a construction accident that killed three people in downtown Boston on Monday. He was 28.

A native of Atherton, Calif., Ty was driving down Boylston Street when a 10-ton lift platform suddenly collapsed and crashed onto his Honda Civic.

“[Ty’s] life was cut tragically short before he had the chance to deliver on all his promise; he was destined to have a stellar career as a physician-scientist,” according to a HMS statement released yesterday.

“He had already accomplished much in his life—loving husband and son, skilled pianist, scholar of languages and philosophy, talented researcher, and caring clinician,” the statement said.

When he studied at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), a training program for biomedical engineers and physician-scientists from both institutions, Ty performed creative research on neural development and plasticity, according to Mriganka Sur, a neuroscience professor at MIT who worked with Ty on his research.

Sur, who is also head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said that Ty was “a very nice, kind, decent man” and “a first-rate scientist.”

Ty was also a man of “lots of interests,” Sur added.

When he graduated from HMS in 2004, he received the Kennedy Sheldon Fellowship, which allowed him to study ethics and theology in Vatican City for a year.

Ty wrote on the HST website that he would always remeber “raising his window blinds in Vanderbilt [his HMS residence] and seeing his classmates lower a 40-ft HST banner from Gordon Hall.”

Following graduation, Ty pursued an internship in medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center before becoming a neurology resident in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

His family and friends could not be reached for comment yesterday.