JANE COFFEE

1944 - 2022

COFFEE--Jane Purcell. Math professor, educational innovator, inspiring teacher, and director of the Teacher Education Honors Academy ("TEHA" or, more popularly, the "Teacher Academy") at the College of Staten Island, Jane Coffee died on September 23, 2022 of cancer. She leaves behind her husband, John C. Coffee ("Jack"), a law professor at Columbia University Law School, and her daughter, Megan Purcell Coffee, a medical doctor and researcher specializing in infectious disease. Born in 1944, Jane Coffee was the daughter of James Purcell and Margaret Donovan Purcell; she grew up in Meriden, Connecticut, was valedictorian at Orville H. Platt High School, and won a scholarship to Smith College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in mathematics. Also, at Smith, she met her future husband, Jack, who was a student at nearby Amherst. After Smith, Jane pursued a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and became one of the first women at that school to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics. On graduation from Penn in 1970, she began a 52-year marriage to Jack and joined the faculty of the College of Staten Island ("CSI"), the CUNY college on Staten Island. Eventually, she would serve as the Chair of its Mathematics Department for over a decade, while also winning that school's "Best Teacher Award." When her husband taught law at Georgetown, Jane taught calculus at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, which had just admitted women midshipman, and she became one of the first women on that faculty. Jane's proudest achievement was probably her daughter, Megan, who followed in her mother's mathematic footsteps, earning a D.Phil. from Oxford in Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and an M.D. from Harvard. Megan has done both clinical and research work in Africa and Haiti fighting infectious disease, works with the International Rescue Committee, teaches at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia, while also serving as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital and NYU's Grossman School of Medicine. Among Jane's many academic achievements, her proudest was probably her work in helping to found the Teacher Academy, securing funding for it, and directing its operations over the last decade. Organized along the model of a service academy, it gives students a full scholarship if they commit to teach math or science in a New York City secondary school for a defined period. The program has succeeded in placing well-trained graduates of CSI in the math and science programs at a number of Staten Island high schools (and elsewhere). Jane's hope is that she will be remembered by the students who studied with her in the Teacher Academy program for giving them a rigorous, but friendly, introduction to the teaching of mathematics. Those students are her legacy.