Stephen Warren (geneticist)

Throughout his career, Warren has been involved with the American Society of Human Genetics in various capacities, becoming the President of the Society in 2006. In 1999, he won the William Allan Award, the highest honor of the American Society of Human Genetics.

In 2003, Warren was an inaugural inductee of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Hall of Honor for the "identification of triplet repeat expansion as the cause of fragile X syndrome and as an entirely new inherited mechanism of genetic disease". He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2004, the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Medical Genetics.

Stephen T. Warren was an American geneticist and academic. He was the William Patterson Timmie Professor of Human Genetics and the Charles Howard Candler Chair of Human Genetics. He was the former Founding Chairman of the Department of Human Genetics at Emory University School of Medicine. He was an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1991 until 2002, when he resigned to found the Human Genetics department. Warren is well known for his work in the field of Human Genetics. His research was focused on the mechanistic understanding of fragile X syndrome, a leading cause of inherited developmental disability and autism. In 2020, Warren stepped down as department chair after 20 years in that position.

Following his postgraduate fellowship, he joined Emory University as an Assistant Professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Pediatrics (Medical Genetics) in 1985. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991 and Full Professor in 1993.

He began his molecular experiments to implement this strategy in 1985 when he established his own laboratory at Emory University. Using his somatic cells hybrids, Warren led an international group, including his longtime collaborator David L. Nelson at Baylor College of Medicine, that isolated the FMR1 gene responsible for fragile X syndrome in 1991. The cloning of this locus also uncovered, for the first time, a trinucleotide repeat expansion mutation, a mechanism now known to be responsible for dozens of genetic diseases.

Warren continued his graduate studies at Michigan State University, completing his Ph.D. in Human Genetics in 1981. His doctoral Advisor was James Trosko. He completed his post graduate training at the University of Illinois at Chicago at the Center for Genetics and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg.

Warren was born in 1953 and was raised in East Detroit, Michigan (now Eastpointe, Michigan). He began his undergraduate studies at Michigan State University in 1972 and graduated with a B.S. in Zoology in 1976. While a freshman, he began his involvement in medical genetics by volunteering in the clinical genetics diagnostic laboratory with James Higgins where he continued to work throughout his undergraduate studies. During his summer breaks he worked with geneticists Lester Weiss and Gene Jackson at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.