[4] Cooper was born in New York and grew up in multiple locations in the South, including Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
[5] In 2007-2008, Cooper served as chair of Kol Haverim, the Finger Lakes Community for Humanistic Judaism in Ithaca, New York.
Since January 2019, Cooper has worked at North Carolina State University, where she is an Associate Professor in Forestry and Environmental Resources.
[8] Much of her work is dedicated to developing public science programs that focus volunteers on generating "large-scale data to study and visualize the interactions between social and ecological systems.
[11] She also helped design the NestWatch, Celebrate Urban Birds, and YardMap citizen science projects for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
[13] She served as assistant director of the Biodiversity Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
On March 17, 2018, she gave the Paul F-Brandwein Lecture at the National Science Teachers Association Annual Meeting in Atlanta.
for Sound Around Town, a citizen science project designed to study noise levels in urban environments and how they affect people.