The body of a Dartmouth College graduate student who had been missing since May 15 was found in the Connecticut River on Monday, police said.
Kexin Cai, 26, had last been seen on Wednesday leaving her home on an electronic, the Lebanon, N.H., Police Department said in a statement.
A fisherman reported seeing a body along the Connecticut River in Windsor, Vt., around 4 p.m. Monday and alerted authorities. Local emergency services and rescue personnel were dispatched to the area and brought the body, later identified as Cai, to shore at 5:36 p.m., police said.
“Preliminary investigation suggests there is no foul play in this incident,” police said in the statement.
Cai was a graduate student in the Mutual Understanding Lab of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and she was “interested in emergent dynamics between interacting brains during real-time reciprocal social communication,” according to the university’s website.
A native of China, she was a second-year doctoral student in the psychological and brain sciences department, according to The Dartmouth, the student newspaper at the university.
Lebanon police said they had been searching for Cai since Friday, when the department first learned she was missing, police said.
Investigators reviewed video footage from two local businesses that showed Cai leaving on her e-bike around 6 p.m. last Wednesday and heading south on Route 10 towards West Lebanon, police said.
On Monday morning police received information that a passing motorist spotted an e-bike at the Boston Lot Conservation Area, police said.
“In combination with the video and the reported sighting of the bike a search was concentrated on the Boston Lot and adjoining Wilder Dam area,” police said in the statement. “Local Law Enforcement agencies, Dartmouth Safety and Security, New England K-9, DHART Helicopter, and Conservation Officers from the NH Fish and Game Department assisted in the search for Kexin. The Lebanon and Hanover communities came together with many good Samaritans requesting to help in the search.”
Jon Kull, Dartmouth’s Dean of the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, shared the news of Cai’s death to the university community in an email, according to The Dartmouth.
“Kexin was an exceptionally gifted and humble researcher with a genuinely sweet personality,” Kull wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Dartmouth. “She loved cats so much that she would sneak images of them into every poster or presentation. Kexin loved the Upper Valley.”
Emily Sweeney can be reached at emily.sweeney@globe.com. Follow her @emilysweeney and on Instagram @emilysweeney22.
