Dick Clarke's accumulated experience within the combined disciplines of undersea and hyperbaric medicine extends over 50 years. Following service in the British Royal Navy throughout the decade of the 1960's he spent two years a program director at the International Underwater Explorers Society on Grand Bahama Island. He subsequently joined the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration undersea living program, operating, living in, and working from seabed habitats in the subtropics and beneath Canadian ice. Dick served as faculty for NOAA's diving medical officer training course for 25 years and from 1976 to 1985 he was employed by Oceaneering International as an oilfield saturation diving superintendent. During this period, he was a member of the team that developed the diver medic training program and its subsequent board certification process.

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From 1985 until 2022 Dick centered his hyperbaric and diving medicine operational support, education, and research interests at Richland Hospital/University of South Carolina School of Medicine. Over 8,000 health care professionals trained within this program. He developed the Baromedical Research Foundation, a basic science laboratory that transitioned to become a centerpiece for an international clinical trials consortium. One Foundation study was the first randomized, controlled double-blind trial to demonstrate hyperbaric medicine’s treatment efficacy for deficient wound healing. His current research interests address radiation sensitization of hyperbaric oxygen in newly diagnosed squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck.

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Dick was instrumental in the development of the Certification in Hyperbaric Technology (CHT) program and continues to serve as president of its certification body, the National Board of Diving & Hyperbaric Medical Technology. He has written numerous peer-reviewed medical and technical articles, authored chapters in undersea medicine and hyperbaric oxygen therapy textbooks and served as a reviewer for the U.S. Navy Diving Manual and the journals Anesthesiology, Undersea Biomedical Research, Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine, Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine, and the British Medical Journal.  Dick continues to serve as a subject matter expert for purchasers of health care, including Medicare and most leading commercial insurers. Since 1996 he has been contracted with the Divers Alert Network to adjudicate diving accident insurance claims and to oversee introduction and operational oversight of an international network of DAN affiliated recompression chambers.