[2] During this time he completed graduate studies at Columbia University, earning a Master of Arts in 1926 and a Ph.D. in 1930 with a dissertation on the Copa.
[3][4] In 1932, Drabkin married classicist and Columbia graduate Norma Loewenstein, who eventually became professor in the classics department at Brooklyn College.
[5] With Morris Raphael Cohen he edited A Sourcebook in Greek Science, a compilation, with commentary, for which Drabkin did many of the translations.
In the late 1940s, Drabkin noticed an entry in a Swiss manuscript dealer's catalog that he identified as a 13th-century copy of Caelius Aurelianus' Gynaecia, a roughly 5th century Latin translation of a 2nd-century Greek work on gynecology, obstetrics, and diseases of women by Soranus of Ephesus, which, while widely used during the Middle Ages, was long believed lost.
[15] At various times he held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Harvard.