Trained as a biochemist, I became a specialist in cryo-EM during my PhD (Université de Rennes, 2000-2003) and my first postdoc (Birkbeck College, London, 2004-2006). After a year's parental leave, convinced that structural biology should be directly combined with functional analysis to be more efficient, I joined the group of Pr Pierre-Emmanuel Gleizes at the LBME in Toulouse in 2008. In this laboratory, I introduced cryo-EM and SPA to study the maturation mechanisms of eukaryotic ribosomal subunits. Thanks to the technological developments of this method, our group was one of the first to determine the atomic structure of human pre-ribosomal particles. I now lead the OncoRib group at CBI and our aim is to understand how defects in ribosome assembly, composition or function can lead to certain cancers or other human pathologies.