Drummond was born in New Zealand in 1950, and was educated at Auckland University, where he graduated a B. Sc. (Hons), at Harvard where he received an A. M. (masters) degree, and at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, where his D.Phil. degree was supervised by Dan Walls and Crispin Gardiner. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Joseph H. Eberly at The University of Rochester, and then as an academic at Auckland University before being appointed to a chair of physics at Queensland University in 1989. He moved to Swinburne University of Technology in 2008.