Eric Coker

Dr. Eric Coker is a senior scientist with the Environmental Health Services program at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and an adjunct professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. His work integrates environmental epidemiology, exposure science, and maternal-child health to understand how early-life chemical exposures affect lifelong health and to illuminate environmental drivers of health disparities.

Education & Training

• PhD, Public Health – Oregon State University
• MS, Global Health Science – University of California, San Francisco
• MS, Occupational & Environmental Health Exposure Science – University of Washington
• Post-doctoral training, Maternal Child Health & Global Health – University of California, Berkeley

Research Focus

Dr. Coker’s research centres on children’s environmental health, especially prenatal and early-childhood exposures to complex chemical mixtures such as metals, PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates and air pollutants. By leveraging advanced epidemiologic and statistical methods—including machine learning and Bayesian modelling—he examines how these exposures contribute to neurodevelopmental impairment, growth restriction, respiratory disease, and later-life mortality. A unifying theme is the elucidation of social and environmental inequalities that shape disproportionate risk in Indigenous, racialized and low-income communities.

Recent work has expanded to climate-health intersections, investigating co-exposures to wildfire smoke and extreme heat and developing risk-communication strategies to protect vulnerable populations. Additional studies employ wastewater-based epidemiology for community-level COVID-19 surveillance and explore occupational respiratory risks among agricultural workers.

Publications

Across more than 30 peer-reviewed articles (2014-2025), Dr. Coker’s scholarship spans five interconnected domains: (1) maternal–fetal and child health effects of metals and endocrine-disrupting chemicals; (2) air pollution and respiratory outcomes in both children and adults; (3) epigenetic mechanisms linking early-life exposures to later disease; (4) climate change, wildfire smoke and heat-health; and (5) novel methodological advances in mixture epidemiology and wastewater surveillance.

Current Affiliations & Labs

Dr. Coker leads and collaborates on studies within the BCCDC Environmental Health Services, working closely with multi-disciplinary teams that include toxicologists, data scientists, Indigenous health researchers, and public health practitioners. He maintains adjunct faculty status at UBC, where he mentors graduate students and contributes to curriculum on environmental health and epidemiologic methods.