Profile: Professor Ian Jones

and animated man with a dazzling set of credentials, including over 18 500 citations of his research output. What I immediately liked about him was his pragmatic determination to improve the quality of clinical performance by whatever means comes to hand. Ian Jones does not see himself as a purist researcher: 'The ultimate goal of research is making things better for people with these conditions. .. via the development of services and stigma reduction. I'm primarily a clinician rather than a scientist'. His first exposure to research was doing an MSc in Cardiff as a psychiatric trainee, subsequently a Wellcome training fellowship in Birmingham, and a year in the USA, all looking at bipolar disorder and postnatal issues, before settling in Cardiff. He is a Welshman from the Rhondda Valleys. His grandfather had to leave school aged 15 to go down the mines because his father had died in a mining accident. Jones' own father was a schoolteacher who became a Minister, and the family moved to England when Ian Jones was a child. He remains grateful for the opportunity he had to get a medical education without student debt, and fears for the potential narrowness of medical school intake in these harsher times. He now lives in Worcester with his GP wife, so he is well attuned to the difficulty of accessing secondary psychiatric care. They have three children between the ages of 13 and 19 and he is a fan of modern British folk music and the Worcester Warriors (rugby, of course, not football). While not wishing to be too politically provocative, he admits that leaving the NCMH deliberately ambiguous (Wales, the nation or the whole UK?) is a tacit challenge to all the London institutions which do not hesitate to call themselves 'national'. On the other hand, he fully acknowledges that they are funded by Welsh healthcare research money. Professor Nick Craddock has been a career-long mentor, a role Jones describes as 'particularly important for clinical academics'. Jones appreciates the particular opportunities being a clinical academic affords: 'you still treat patients but you have a bit more flexibility than in a pure NHS job and you get to do research as well'. In his role as a researcher it seems likely that his affable personality lends itself to collaborative research projects (e.g. as part of the Wellcome Trust genome-wide association study group) and his enthusiasm for patient …