Glenda Halliday (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0422-8398) has been a full-time Research Fellow in the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and Australian Research Council since 1988, attesting to the quality of her research ideas and her ability to prosecute them. She has successfully worked with many Australian and international neuroscientists, geneticists and clinicians on important scientific questions on central autonomic systems, Parkinson’s disease, alcohol toxicity, dementia with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal dementias and motor neurodegenerative diseases. She studies the molecular and cellular properties of the human brain, providing core neuroanatomical and biochemical information to understand the effect of neurodegenerative diseases. Using comparative studies of the brains of humans and animals, she has identified differences in the functional anatomy of the main regions modulating cortical activity. She has defined the earliest biochemical signatures in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, and frontotemporal dementias. Her research has identified previously unrecognised brain regions that selectively degenerate in these diseases, and revealed the involvement of glial brain cells.