Adrian Docken was born November 17, 1913 in Holt, Minnesota, He graduated from Luther College in 1937 with degrees in chemistry and mathematics. Docken then went and earned a PhD in chemistry in 1941 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joined the chemistry faculty at Luther College in 1942 and remained until his retirement in 1979. He continued to run his research lab at Luther until 2002. While at Luther, Docken and his colleague George Knudson developed the chemistry major and earned the accreditation of the American Chemical Society.
Docken received several grants and fellowships to support his research and develop Luther's science facilities during his career, including from the National Science Foundation. He spent 1954-1955 as the Faculty Fellow of the Ford Foundation for the Advancement of Education at Yale University, 1961-1962 as the National Science Foundation Faculty Fellow at Imperial College of Science in London, 1967-1968 at Stanford University as the Petroleum Research Fund recipient, and as a visiting scholar in the fall of 1974 at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Docken married Orene Madson, a 1938 Luther graduate, in 1941. They had four children and were active in the local Decorah community.
Docken passed away on November 27, 2003.