[6] Her father left Turkey for Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1913 on the advice of a German engineer who warned him that the Turkish government planned on exterminating the Armenians.
Her mother and three of her siblings survived and reconnected, and were able to emigrate to the United States in 1921 with tickets from her fiancée in Minneapolis, who she had never met, having been introduced through a friend by correspondence.
[6] Her and her sisters were very involved in their church community as children: they attended weekly Sunday school, bible classes, sang in the choir, and participated in youth fellowship programs.
[6] In the summer between her junior and senior undergraduate year, she spent time pursuing a research endeavor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria during which she learned German, which came in handy during her career.
[4][6] For her final two years of medical school, she worked a research job in University of Minnesota's department of psychiatry.
Her first rotation was neurosurgery, followed by psychiatry, then pediatrics, anesthesia, obstetrics, tuberculosis service, surgery, gynecology, medicine, orthopedics, the diabetic ward, then finally outpatient.
[6] With funds from the NIH, the pair began a study on the myelination of the nervous system from the stage of viability to term.
[9][10] Riggs died shortly after the book was written, without knowing it had been accepted for publication,[8][3] and Rorke assumed responsibility of neuropathology at PGH in 1968.
[6] Based on her findings during this study, Rorke proposed reclassifications of embryonic pediatric brain tumors in a her presidential address to the American Association of Neuropathologists, which led to improved treatment and outcomes for patients.
[4][12] In 1972, the office of the medical examiner for the city of Philadelphia moved their location to PGH, bringing Rorke into close contact with forensic pathology for the first time.
[5] During her time at CHOP, Rorke was the author of pioneering studies on the infant brain's normal and abnormal development, the effects of inadequate oxygenation during the perinatal period, and various nervous disorders unique to children.
[14] In the 1990s, she presented a hypothesis on the origin of brain malformations arising in early human development: she proposed that disordered genetic control allows neurons to migrate to abnormal, disease-causing locations.
[4] She has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuropathy and Experimental Neurology, Brain Pathology, and Pediatric Neuroscience.
When PGH closed in 1977, Riggs donated the Osler collection, including the autopsy table, instruments and records, to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
[17] Rorke-Adams had also obtained a set of 23 pairs of slides from the brain of Albert Einstein in the 1970s, and donated them to the Mutter Museum in November 2011.
[6] Adams died of metastatic cancer two years and two months after they were married, leaving Rorke-Adams widowed for the second time.