Richard Coker is Emeritus Professor of Public Health. He trained in medicine at St. Mary's Hospital, London and, in 1994, became consultant physician to the hospital and senior lecturer at Imperial College School of Medicine. His interests include communicable diseases, in particular emerging infectious diaseases, HIV, and tuberculosis, and health systems responses to disasters. In 1997, as a Harkness Fellow, he spent a year at Columbia School of Public Health in New York, USA, researching the causes and responses to the epidemic of tuberculosis that city witnessed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His book, From Chaos to Coercion: detention and the control of tuberculosis, was one of the results from this work. He subsequently worked as a Wellcome Research Associate researching public health legislative responses to infectious disease threats. In recent years he has worked in predominantly in SE Asia on public health responses to support control of infectious diseases. He joined the School in 1999 as a Research Fellow before becoming Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2005, and Professor of Public Health in 2009. He retired in 2019 and was appointed emeritus that year.

He has been based in Bangkok, Thailand, since 2008.