As well as his academic career, Cliff has spent over twenty years in industry (which might explain why "applicability" is an issue in most of his research). His fifteen years in IBM saw, among other things, the creation -with colleagues in the Vienna Lab- of VDM which is one of the better known "formal methods". Under Tony Hoare, Cliff wrote his Oxford doctoral thesis in two years (and enjoyed the family atmosphere of Wolfson College). From Oxford, he moved directly to a chair at Manchester University where he built a world-class Formal Methods group which -among other projects- was the academic lead in the largest Software Engineering project funded by the Alvey programme (IPSE 2.5 created the "mural"(Formal Method) Support Systems theorem proving assistant).
During his time at Manchester, Cliff had a 5-year Senior Fellowship from the research council and later spent a sabbatical at Cambridge for the whole of the Newton Institute event on "Semantics" (and there appreciated the hospitality of a Visiting Fellowship at Gonville & Caius College. Much of his research at this time focused on formal (compositional) development methods for concurrent systems.
In 1996 he moved to Harlequin, directing some fifty developers on Information Management projects and finally became overall Technical Director before leaving to re-join academia in 1999.
Cliff is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), ACM, BCS, and IET.
He has been a member of IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) since 1973 (and was Chair from 1987-96).