Service to remember Homer City native

A service of remembrance saluting the life of Patricia Hilliard Robertson will be held 2 p.m. Tuesday at St. Thomas Moore parish at the Newman Center, 1200 Oakland Ave., Indiana.

Robertson, a Homer City native and physician who recently completed astronaut training for NASA, died May 24 at age 38 from burns she received when the light private plane in which she was a passenger crashed and burst into flames Houston two days earlier.

She and pilot Roy Mack Paul Adams were practicing maneuvers at the time of the accident. Both were burned over more than 80 percent of their bodies.

The Rev. Michael Crookston, pastor for St. Thomas Moore, and the Rev. Priscilla Ritcher of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Indiana will preside over the service. Selected friends of Robertson's family will speak briefly.

Friends will gather following the service at Breezedale Alumni Center on the campus of Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Robertson was a 1980 graduate of Homer Center High School and a 1985 graduate of IUP, where she received a bachelor's degree in biology. In March, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the university.

She graduated from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1989 and was a board-certified family physician.

Robertson was a member of NASA's astronaut class of 1998 and completed a two-year fellowship in space medicine. She had hoped to be assigned to the International Space Station to provide crew support.

Robertson was married to Scott Robertson, a charter pilot. She was the daughter of Ilse Hilliard and the late Harold Hilliard of Homer City, as well as the sister of Keith Hilliard, an Indiana optometrist.