Croarken earned a degree in computer science from the University of Warwick in 1982 and a doctorate in the history of science there in 1986,[1][2] supervised by Martin Campbell-Kelly, who describes her as one of his two most successful students.
[3] After leaving academia to raise a family in Norwich,[2][3] she became a health research manager in the National Health Service,[3][4] while continuing to work in the history of science as an independent scholar.
She has been a research fellow at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and in the computer science department at the University of Warwick.
[1] Croarken is the author of the book Early Scientific Computing in Britain (Clarendon Press, 1990).
[5] She is a co-editor of The History of Mathematical Tables: from Sumer to Spreadsheets (Oxford University Press, 2003)[6] and of Mathematics at the Meridian: The History of Mathematics at Greenwich (Chapman & Hall / CRC, 2020)[7]