James Coker

At Johns Hopkins, James Coker serves as the Director of the Center for Biotechnology Education.

He has over 25 years of experience in higher education as a Principal Investigator, Faculty Member, and Administrator. His lab studied evolutionary adaptations as models to design better performing enzymes for biotechnology applications as well as generating models to visualize protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions. He is passionate about student success, especially for adult and military learners, and employing software-based adaptive learning strategies and AI modeling to improve student outcomes.

Coker is currently a member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, the Education Committee at the International Society for Computational Biology, the IEEE CIS Task Force on Optimization Methods in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering, and the Faculty of 1000.

Coker earned Bachelor of Science degrees in zoology, and in microbiology and molecular genetics, with a minor in philosophy, from Oklahoma State University. He received his PhD in biochemistry, molecular biology, and microbiology from The Pennsylvania State University.