Dr. Alan Warren is Professor of Haematology at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research laboratory is based in the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. Warren gained his PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Terry Rabbitts at the LMB where he discovered that the LIM-only protein Lmo2 is required for haematopoiesis. In recent work, his lab has made the surprising discovery that the inherited leukaemia predisposition disorder Shwachman-Diamond syndrome (SDS) is a “ribosomopathy” that is caused by impaired maturation of the large ribosomal subunit. This work has provided fundamental new insight into the process of ribosome assembly, stimulating a new field addressing how defective ribosome biogenesis subverts haematopoietic stem cell function to cause bone marrow failure and leukaemia predisposition.