Jesse Coker

Jesse Coker is the Group Leader of Chemical Biology at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Therapeutics Discovery (C3TD), where he has worked since 2021 under the direction of Shaun Stauffer. As an undergraduate, Jesse was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for his drug discovery research with Adam Duerfeldt at the University of Oklahoma and Stephen Fesik at Vanderbilt University. Jesse received the Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Prize Studentship to complete his doctoral work at Oxford, where he was jointly supervised by Brian Marsden and Wyatt Yue at the Structural Genomics Consortium and Kim Midwood at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology. Jesse has multidisciplinary technical expertise across structural, cellular, and chemical biology, and his research focuses on developing rigorous, reproducible wet-lab methods for investigating target biology, generating chemical starting points, and guiding medicinal chemistry decision-making. Jesse is dedicated to the development of novel, more affordable business models in drug discovery, and he has served as the Science and Strategy Consultant for the charity Action Against Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AAAMD) under the leadership of Wen Hwa Lee since 2019. Jesse’s growing publication and patent record spans kinases, GTPases, proteases, immune receptors, and beyond.