Pang Ko graduated from Iowa State University with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in 2007, under the guidance of Prof. Srinivas Aluru, specializing in computer algorithms, data structures and bioinformatics. He was awarded the university's 'Research Excellence Award' as well as the 'Departmental Research Award' for his doctoral work. His paper "Space-Efficient Linear Time Construction of Suffix Arrays" is widely cited, as of August 2010, 212 citations were generated.

Currently, Pang Ko is a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, San Diego, as a member of Prof. Shankar Subramaniam's laboratory in the Department of Bioengineering. His research focus is to create new protocol to measure genes expression using next generation sequencing machines. He developed various algorithms and software, both parallel and serial, to simulate the protocol; verify its result using actual experiment data; and detect possible anomalies.

Pang Ko received a B.S. in Computer Science, and a B.S. in Mathematics (minor in Statistics), from Iowa State University, both with distinctions. He was in the Honors Program and won the Marian Daniells Scholarship during his undergraduate studies.