Show Quick Read Key points generated by AI, verified by newsroom UCSB PhD student Vikram Mubayi disappeared during a solo hike. An Indian-origin PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), has been found dead after disappearing during a solo hiking trip in California's eastern Sierra Nevada. Vikram Mubayi, a chemical engineering doctoral candidate at UC Santa Barbara's Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering, set out on a solo hike in the Big Pine Lakes area over the weekend. Before joining UC Santa Barbara, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022. He was pursuing his doctoral studies in chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara's Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at the time of his death.