Eliot Ramsay Kalmbach ’09

Eliot Ramsay Kalmbach, 24, died on September 22, 2009 in a mountaineering accident in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.   He entered Princeton from Downingtown, Pennsylvania with the Class of 2008. Eliot was an empathetic and enthusiastic member of Mathey College, Chi Phi fraternity, and Tiger Inn. He majored in geosciences, loved Turkish and Near Eastern Studies, and traveled extensively during summers and a year off, completing the NOLS semester in Patagonia, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, and earning membership in the Explorers Club of New York. He withdrew from Princeton in February 2009 and helped launch a startup, smsPREP, then studied volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. He was traveling to intern at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington when he died. He planned to return in February 2010 to complete his final semester.

Eliot was honored at the 2010 Gordon Conference on Origins of Life as coauthor of research presented by Dr Louis Lerman and by the establishment of the Sherwood Chang-Eliot Kalmbach Award for Excellence in Astrobiology Research.

As inscribed on his Chapel memorial stone by his parents, John Kalmbach ’73 and Cecilia Rice Kalmbach ’74 and sisters Hilary Kalmbach ’04 and Whitney Kalmbach Moore ’05: “Sic itur ad astra.”