[2] He did his graduate work with paleontologist Bruce Clark at the University of California, Berkeley, where he got his Ph.D. in paleontology in 1935 with a dissertation on fossil mollusks of the Middle Eocene.
[2] Vokes took a postdoctoral fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, where he worked with Carl Owen Dunbar.
[2][3] In 1940, a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to study the geology and paleontology of the mountain regions of Lebanon, and especially the mollusks found in chalk strata.
[3][4] In 1943, during World War II, Vokes joined the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to search for uranium.
[2][3] He continued working intermittently for the USGS after the war until 1956, mapping the coast of Oregon and searching for oil under the Columbia Plateau.
[2] At Tulane, Vokes was tasked with rebuilding the Geology Department, and within a few years, he had doubled the number of faculty and added a graduate program.
[3] His researches took him to the Indian Ocean (1964), the Caribbean (1965), Panama and Costa Rica (1968), the Dominican Republic (1976–86), Europe (1984), and much of South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador).
[5] These collections included research findings from excursions to the southeastern United States, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Europe.