Patti Taranto Erickson passed away peacefully on December 24th, 2021, at her home in Salisbury, MD, surrounded by her family. She was 54 years old and had been fiercely fighting breast cancer for 16 months.
Patti was born on November 13, 1967, in Pompton Plains, NJ to Alfred and Patricia Taranto. She moved with her family to Shelby, NC in 1975. She graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a public residential high school for high-achieving students located in Durham, NC, in 1986. Patti thrived at NCSSM where she often said, “I found my people”. In 1990, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Virginia Tech with a BS honors degree in Biochemistry. She then interned a year at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany before earning a PhD in Plant Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. She was employed as a bioeducation scientist at Bio-Rad Laboratories in Hercules, CA from 1999 to 2002.
To read the full obituary, click here.