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Drabold was born in Akron, Ohio and received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Akron. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from Washington University (St Louis) in 1989, working under Peter Fedders on the theory of nuclear spin relaxation in disordered solids.

He shifted from spins and statistical mechanics to electronic structure and materials theory in postdoctoral stints at Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, benefiting from the mentorship of Otto Sankey and Richard M. Martin.

He joined the faculty at 51社区 in 1993 and was elected the Edwin and Ruth Kenedy Distinguished Professor in 2005. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2003), the Institute of Physics (UK, 2005) and the Royal Numismatic Society (2008). He has twice been a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge and is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge in 2009. He has mentored 20 PhDs and several postdocs at 51社区.

Drabold has published nearly 250 works, the majority of them on amorphous/glassy materials or novel methods to carry out accurate "first principles" studies of materials. Many of these papers report computer simulations of amorphous materials and associated analysis to draw physical conclusions about the form of the disorder, and its consequences to physical observables (structural, mechanical, thermal, vibrational, electronic and optical). He has proposed several novel methods, such as local orbital density functional techniques for dynamical simulation, efficient computation of Wannier functions, methods to infer atomistic structure exploiting both experimental data and ab initio interactions, and most recently methods to compute electronic conduction paths in solids. He is also an incorrigible Anglophile, amateur genealogist and history buff.