His years at Harvard were undistinguished, earning high grades in chemistry (his major) and mining (his minor).

Torrey died unexpectedly in 1910, so Adams finished his Ph.D. under Charles Loring Jackson, George Shannon Forbes, and Latham Clarke.

In 1916, Adams accepted an offer of an assistant professorship from William A. Noyes, head of the chemistry department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Adams vigorously researched methods of preparing local anaesthetics with Oliver Kamm who was also on the faculty of UIUC and a consultant to Abbott Laboratories in a relationship that lasted into the 1960s.

Adams's return to UIUC began a period (1918–1926) of intense research, with 45 Ph.D. students that resulted in 73 publications.

Bush wanted to bring Adams into the National Defense Research Committee that he was organizing for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At this time the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover was doing surveillance on "suspect American citizens" and had been keeping a file on Roger Adams.

The FBI had informed Hoover that Adams was a leading member of an apparent Communist front group called the Lincoln's Birthday Committee for the Advancement of Science.

For the purposes of this research, Adams had obtained red oil extract of the plant legally from the United States Department of the Treasury.

However, Hoover continued to be suspicious of the political loyalties of the scientists involved in the World War II mobilization because of their internationalist worldview.

Adams was politically active, but not affiliated with any group called the Lincoln's Birthday Committee for the Advancement of Science.

He was a member of the Lincoln's Birthday Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (LBCDIF), which was founded by the prominent anthropologist Franz Boas to discredit Nazi racial policies.