[2] In 1978 Clarke became a full professor at the University of British Columbia and gave an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Helsinki.
During the nine years of his directorship, CRM became Canada's leading national research center for mathematics and its applications.
The successes of Clarke's directorship included the creation of workshops and postdoctoral fellowships, thematic years, two series of publications, research awards, and an endowment fund.
[citation needed] In 1995 Francis Clarke was appointed full professor at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, where he was a member of the Institut Camille-Jordan.
[citation needed] Francis Clarke is known for his contributions to nonsmooth analysis (a term that is due to him), and particularly for his theory of generalized gradients (gradients généralisés), as well as for his work in optimization, differential equations, control theory, calculus of variations, and modeling in several application domains.