Jeffrey Prater taught for thirty-three years in the Department of Music at Iowa State University and is now Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2010. During his years at Iowa State University, Prater served as the chair of the Music Department’s Theory-Composition division and was a named Master Teacher, and Distinguished Scholar in the Arts and Humanities. He holds the Ph.D. degree from The University of Iowa (1982). Prater has written nearly ninety original musical compositions in various musical genres, and has received numerous distinguished performances, commissions, and awards for his work, including a nomination for the prestigious Grawemeyer Award.

Prater also maintains a strong research interest in the pedagogy music theory. He translated and published two book-length treatises from German to English, authored an aural theory textbook, and has published articles and presented papers in the areas of aesthetics education, history of music theory, and analysis for performers.

Prater was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in 2005 at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia. Since that time, he has returned to Russia many times and presented over eighty lectures on musical culture in the United States for the U.S. State Department, major Russian universities and music conservatories, and public schools. In 2011, Prater presented a plenary address on using music as a medium for teaching language, history and culture to the Russian National Association of Teachers of English, and was a keynote speaker at the 2013 Fulbright Conference in Moscow commemorating the fortieth year of Fulbright in Russia.