To Infinity And Beyond

Farmingdale High School senior aims for interstellar colonization

Lily Coffin wants to go to Mars. It’s a dream she’s latched onto ever since her eighth-grade earth science teacher screened a documentary about a Mars One project whose goal was to explore the Red Planet.
“This documentary was about creating a colony on Mars and I decided that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said.

Coffin is well on her way to reaching that dream. She’ll be attending the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a mechanical engineering/planetary science double major in the fall, a perfect fit for her future plans.
“Cal Tech is attached to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” Coffin explained. “They have a really strong emphasis on research and I’ve done a lot of research in high school. So it’s a really good fit for me in terms of what I’ll be able to do as an undergrad because I’ve always wanted something beyond the classroom setting. Even in high school, I worked in four labs in three years. A place where I could do research was important to me. Plus, they’re ranked something like number five globally. It’s a very good school.”

Helping out with the tuition are a trio of grants Coffin was surprised to receive—the Two Brothers Scrap Metal Environmental Conservation Scholarship ($1,000), a PTA Merit Scholarship ($350) and the Dr. Roger S. Weinblatt Memorial Scholarship ($1,000).
“We weren’t told what scholarships we were actually receiving,” she said. “We just had to sit through the hour-long video that they posted. I was really surprised to end up with three of them.”

Hard work has enabled the Farmingdale native to wind up matriculating at a top university. In addition to spending her senior year commuting to the Cold Spring Harbor lab on a weekly basis, Coffin spent summer 2019 as part of the Siemen’s Research Program, a competitive initiative that featured students from around the country descending on Stony Brook University to do research. Prior to this, the Farmingdale High School senior toiled away in labs in summer 2018 (Molloy College) and summer 2017 (Stony Brook University). The common thread for all these experiences was that Coffin spent her time doing either microbiology or computational biology research.

And while the idea of one day colonizing Mars might seem to be quite a tall order, Coffin credits robotics team advisor Ann Grady with inspiring her to aim so high.
“Coach Grady has worked with a lot of kids in Farmingdale that pursued research, so she knew about all the lab stuff,” Coffins said. “She taught me how to conduct myself in the research pursuit. She always made it seem like the adult part of looking into research opportunities wasn’t too far out of my reach. The reason I was so successful in science research and getting into such a competitive school was because a lot of kids wait to feel like they’re mature enough to do something. We’re all waiting to all go to college and be qualified to do something. But [Grady] kind of taught me that being in high school, as long as you have the motivation to want to learn something, you don’t need to have the prerequisite knowledge to work in a lab, because that’s why I’m there—to learn.”