Michael Coen received his S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, where his doctoral work on self-supervised machine learning received the Sprowls Dissertation Award. His primary academic interests are developing biologically inspired approaches to machine learning and reciprocally, to using these approaches to better understand learning in biological systems.

Coen is the author of "A Similarity Metric for Spatial Probability Distributions",a CSAIL Technical Report, MIT, 2007; and "Multimodal Dynamics: Self-Supervised Learning in Perceptual and Motor Systems," Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT 2006. Coen worked on Wall Street from January 2000 through May 2004.