Clive Ballard had the unfair advantage of being born Welsh and brought up as a Swansea city fan, before studying Medicine in Leicester. Clive then studied psychiatry in Coventry and Birmingham before specialising in the psychiatry of older adults. He moved to Newcastle as an MRC Clinical Fellow and Senior Lecturer in 1995 to join the world leading dementia with the Lewy Body Dementia research group. Clive then moved to the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London in 2003 as Professor of Age-Related Diseases, where he directed the NIHR Biomedical Research Unit for Dementia and codirected the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Disease. From 2003 to 2013 Clive was also Director of Research for the Alzheimer’s Society and played a key role in the successful campaign to overturn a NICE decision and make anti-dementia drugs available for people with dementia. Over this period Clive published more than 200 research papers including key clinical trials focussing on the treatment of dementia with Lewy bodies, dementia in people with Down’s syndrome, vascular dementia and neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia.