Early career

DeVries was born in Detroit, Michigan to Henry William DeVries and Helen Mary DeVries (née Brnabic). His early interest in Biology was nourished by close contact with nature during his childhood in rural Michigan. As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, DeVries was mentored in botany by professor Warren H. Wagner Jr., known among colleagues as "Herb". In 1975, DeVries received a Bachelor's degree from the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan, with emphasis in botany. His early exposure to systematic botany continued to be useful in his career.

From 1975 to 1980, he was a curator of Lepidoptera at the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica as a Peace Corps volunteer where he built the country's first major butterfly collection. DeVries traveled widely in Costa Rica, collecting and making observations on butterflies. This eventually provided a large body of information that formed the basis for his two volumes entitled "The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History" (vol. 1 and 2). In Costa Rica, he interacted with many field biologists, including Daniel Janzen, Stephen P. Hubbell, Alwyn Gentry, Robin B. Foster, Lawrence E. Gilbert [nl], Paul R. Ehrlich, and Russell Lande.

DeVries attended the University of Texas at Austin from 1980 to 1987, where he earned a PhD in Zoology. His doctoral work focused on the widespread symbioses between butterfly caterpillars, ants and plants, which he popularized under the nickname "Singing caterpillars". In 1982, DeVries received a fellowship from the Fulbright Program to visit The Natural History Museum in London (then British Museum of Natural History), where he spent a year preparing the first volume of his "The Butterflies of Costa Rica" book. There, he collaborated with Bernard d'Abrera and other curators and visitors deeply rooted in the history of butterfly biology, evolution and systematics.

In 1988, DeVries received a MacArthur Fellowship that allowed him to travel broadly in pursuit of tropical biology in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Argentina. Through the MacArthur Fellows Program, he became close friends with the artists Lee Friedlander, Steve Lacy, John T. Scott, Brad Leithauser, and the historian Cornell Fleischer.

He was a pre-doctoral (1985–1986) and post-doctoral fellow (1987–1988) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, UK (1990–1991), an associate of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University (1990–1992), and a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow at Harvard University (1993–1994). He is a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History, Missouri Botanical Gardens, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Among other countries, DeVries has done field research in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, Bhutan, Australia, Borneo, Malaysia.

Later career

DeVries was an assistant professor at the University of Oregon (1994–2000), where he developed trapping methods to accrue long-term data sets on tropical butterfly communities. Work with his colleague Russell Lande produced some of the first rigorous insights into the spatial and temporal dynamics of diverse rainforest insect communities. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Director of the Center for Biodiversity Studies and curator of Lepidoptera at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin.

He is presently a professor at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana, along with his wife and close colleague Carla Penz. DeVries continues to study long-term butterfly community diversity, and speciation. His butterfly trapping methods are used widely in tropical diversity studies and conservation efforts. He also continues work on evolution of butterfly-ant symbioses.

Recent honors include: in 2010, DeVries was elected one of 125 extraordinary University of Texas ex-graduates for the university's 125th anniversary; in 2012, the main-belt minor planet 89131 Phildevries was named in DeVries' honor by astronomer Bill Yeung.^[1]