Services set for chemistry professor Erach Talaty
Talaty was born in 1926 in India and received B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from Nagpur University, before moving to the United States and receiving a second Ph.D. in chemistry from Ohio State University in 1957.
He proceeded to a post-doctoral fellowship with Nobel Prize winning chemist Robert Woodward at Harvard University, spent a few years doing research in industry and then completed another post-doctoral fellowship with Glen Russell at Iowa State University.
Talaty held faculty positions at Louisiana State University in New Orleans and the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, before coming to Wichita State University as a professor in 1969. At this time, the WSU Chemistry Department was transitioning from one focused predominantly on teaching into a strong research-active department, and Talaty was a major contributor to this process, distinguishing himself as a researcher and as a teacher and serving a term as department chair.
He was an author on nearly 100 scientific publications, covering a 60-year span from 1951 to 2011, and he obtained many external grants both to fund his own research and to upgrade the infrastructure of the Chemistry Department.
As a teacher, "Dr. T." was much loved by his students, often spending hours in his office with groups of students, making sure they understood the difficult concepts of general chemistry or organic chemistry that he was covering in class.
Talaty was predeceased by his wife, Margaret. He is survived by his sister Ketayum Gould of Virginia, and two stepdaughters, Judith E. Greene and Erica Rafat of Hawaii.