Adele E. Clarke is Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Trained by Anselm Strauss, she has been using and teaching grounded theory since 1980. Clarke’s own research centers on social, cultural and historical studies of science, technology and medicine with emphases on biomedicalization and common medical technologies pertinent to women's health such as contraception and the Pap smear. She is the author of Disciplining Reproduction: American Life Scientists and the ‘Problem of Sex’ (University of California Press, 1998). She co-edited The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth Century Life Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1992, in French by Synthelabo Press, 1996) focused on scientific work and practices.

In women's health, Dr. Clarke co-edited Women's Health: Complexities and Diversities (Ohio State University Press, 1997) and Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Cultural, Feminist and Technoscience Perspectives (Routledge, 1999). Clarke’s recent collaborative work on biomedicalization in the U.S. appeared in the American Sociological Review in 2003. Her current project takes up the history of biomedicalization and globalization by focusing on how medicines have traveled since the early twentieth century.