Adelaide Trowbridge Clark Carpenter, died on Friday 31st May 2024, at her home in Cambridge UK.

Adelaide was born 24th June 1944 in Athens, Georgia, USA. She lived for a few years in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Her parents then moved to Swannanoa, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains in 1948. 

Adelaide played in the Charles D. Owen High School Band in Swannanoa from the age of 10 years old. She continued to love music and played various musical instruments and sang in choirs throughout her life.

When she was in high school, she spent much of her spare time studying with biologist Dr. Ellinore Behre. Adelaide  brought critters such as salamanders to examine in the bedroom she shared with her sister, as well as at Dr. Behre's lab.

Adelaide also sewed a lot of her own clothes, including a beautiful blue prom dress. 

She graduated high school in 1962, when she was awarded a full scholarship to North Carolina State University. She graduated from NC State in Botany with honors in 1966. 

She was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 1966, which enabled her to select the graduate program at the genetics department of the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her PhD there in 1972. Adelaide was awarded a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship (very rarely given) to a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin. She then moved back to North Carolina in 1974 for a second postdoctoral position at Duke University, Durham, NC. In 1975, Adelaide published a paper that made her internationally famous in the field of genetics (Carpenter, Adelaide  TC. 1975 Electron microscopy of meiosis in Drosophila melanogaster females: II: The recombination nodule--a recombination-associated structure at pachytene? Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. US 72:3186-3189).

In 1976 she moved to California to begin as assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego. In 1979 she became an Associate Professor. Then in 1985, she was the first female at the biology department at the University promoted to full professor. There were also 50 men in that position at that time. 

In 1989, Adelaide moved to Cambridge University on her second sabbatical. She resigned the UCSD position early in 1991. She was eventually promoted to Senior Research Associate. When the grant supporting her position terminated, she became a visiting professor. She continued to work in the lab at Cambridge until her health collapsed late January 2024. She continued participating in on-line seminars and group meetings.

Adelaide is survived by her younger sister, Alden Clark, of Matthews, North Carolina, USA. She was preceded in death by her father, Philip Trowbridge Clark, her mother Luelle Mitchell Clark; and her younger brother Hayden Adams Clark.