Dr. Coker is an associate professor and the program chair for the Bioinformatics and Biotechnology Regulatory Affairs Specializations within the Biotechnology Master’s Program at the University of Maryland Global Campus. He was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where his laboratory studied the various adaptations organisms make to thrive in extreme conditions. Before that he worked at the Center of Marine Biotechnology studying the information transfer apparatus of the halophilic archaea. He is an active member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Bioinformatic and Bioengineering Technical Committee's task force on Optimization Methods in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering. He earned his PhD from Penn State University.