Clarke has a 1986 bachelor's degree from Dublin City University.[2] She worked for IBM for ten years[3] before returning to Dublin City University for a PhD, which she completed in 2001, supervised by John Murphy.[4] She joined Trinity College Dublin in 2000.[3] She is the director of the Enable and Future Cities projects, head of Networks and Distributed Systems in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, and head of the Distributed Systems Group.[1] She is the co-author, with Elisa Baniassad, of Aspect-oriented Analysis and Design: The Theme Approach (2005).[5]