Robert E. Coker, a farm boy from Darlington, South Carolina, was an undergraduate at UNC, graduating in 1896. He stayed on as a graduate assistant, taking his masters degree with H.V.P. Wilson, and then worked with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries at Beaufort, North Carolina for 3 years before returning to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his doctorate at Hopkins in 1906 with W.K. Brooks, as Wilson had done before.

Coker was always attracted to broad scale ecological problems primarily in marine biology, and was a "charter member" of the "Ecological Society of America." Just out of Hopkins, he accepted an appointment from the Peruvian government to study the problem of guano harvesting on the "Bird Islands" off the coast of Peru. Historically this was the first "environmental impact study." This study recommended enforced governmental protection of marine birds and their nesting sites, and a strict program of rotational harvesting from these islands in such a manner that their natural resources could maximally be exploited and permanently protected.

The Department of Biology presents the R.E. Coker Award to a senior undergraduate for excellence in research in organismal biology and ecology.