She attended Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury, and won a County Major Scholarship to study botany at the University of Manchester.

In 1925 she spent two years working at the University of California, Berkeley, after winning a Commonwealth Fellowship, travelling as far as Hawaii to collect botanical samples.

[citation needed] Although Drew-Baker never travelled to Japan, her academic research made a lasting contribution to the development of commercial nori production in the country.

[citation needed] Drew-Baker was a co-founder of the British Phycological Society in 1952 with her friend and fellow phycologist Margaret T. Martin[10] and its first elected president.

[11] She married Professor Henry Wright-Baker of the Manchester College of Science and Technology in 1928, and they had two children, John Rendle and K. Frances Biggs.

[7] In honour of her contributions to the Japanese aquaculture and role in rescuing the commercial production of nori, she was named Mother of the Sea in Japan, and since 1953, an annual "Drew festival" is celebrated in the city of Uto, Kumamoto, where a shrine to her was also erected.