Just got this from Guy Plunkett III
The E. coli annotation community lost a founding member when Monica Riley died from heart failure on October 11, 2013 in Richmond, CA. She was 87 years old. Monica will be missed by very many of us. There has not been any announcement that I can find, but I have some information from Gretta Serres at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, who is preparing an obituary for Microbe (the ASM newsletter). In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the Alumnae Association of Smith College. Nothing specific has been set up yet, but donations can be made in memory of Monica Riley, class of 1947, at <https://www.smith.edu/future/giving/giftform.php>.
Very sad. Monica was an incredible woman. I interacted with her on and off for the last twenty or so years and she played prominent roles much of my earlier work. Among her many achievements she was central to the annotation of the E. coli genome and in keeping track of all the studies that had been done on various E. coli genes. See for example http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/1/1.short. Perhaps most important, she was just a wonderful wonderful person. I will miss her.
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 