American ecologist (born 1954)
James A. Drake (born 1954) is an American ecologist.
Early life and education.
Drake was born on August 20, 1954. He went to Wausau West High School and then to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and graduated with a degree in science education. He later graduated from Purdue in 1985 and became an Andrew Mellon Fellow at Stanford working on Biological Invasions with Harold Mooney. In 1986, he began teaching at The University of Tennessee as an assistant professor in zoology and the ecology graduate program. He was a founding member of their Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Career.
Drake focused on community assembly models and the structure of ecological communities. He helped organize The International Program of the Scientific Committee on Problems with the Environment. This work led to the formation of the scientific study of invasion biology. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal "Biological Invasions" from 2003 to 2008 and edited two major texts from some of the earliest works regarding community ecology at the time "Ecology of Biological Invasions of Hawaii and North America" (1986) and "Biological Invasions: A Global Perspective" (1989). His work is considered as influential work regarding Community Ecology. Some of his students later determined the simultaneous convergence and divergence at different levels of community assembly. Some of his work included sequential and spatial constraints to illustrate the principles of population ecology. His theoretical constructs were later used to describe microbial ecological communities. His most influential work involves emerging complex systems, food webs, and biological invasions.
References.
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