Born in Dublin in 1960, Clive Lee is a TCD graduate in physiology and medicine. He joined the Dublin Surgical Training Scheme and became a Fellow of both the Irish and Edinburgh Royal Colleges of Surgeons. He was appointed Lecturer in Anatomy in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1989 and its 29th Professor of Anatomy in 2002. He obtained his PhD in bone biomechanics in 1995 and then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Medical School, where he developed a novel method for labelling microcrack initiation and propagation in bone, which led to the award of his MD in 1997.

He is a Chartered Engineer and Visiting Professor of Biomechanics and Tissue Engineering in Trinity College Dublin. He is a founder member, medallist and past President of the Section of Bioengineering of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland and was President of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine, 2003-07. He lives in Dublin with his wife Hannah and their three children, Sophie, Ralph and Clara.