Matthew Hotopf is Professor of General Hospital Psychiatry at King’s College London. He is an outstanding academic psychiatrist and a highly effective ambassador for psychiatry in medicine, law and work. His work on the overlap between mental and physical health is widely recognised to be world leading. His work on mental capacity and law has combined careful epidemiological designs with imaginative methodological approaches to ascertain mental capacity in clinical populations, providing the first systematic studies of the needs of clinical populations – work which has influenced the House of Lord’s scrutiny of the Mental Capacity Act.