Misha B Ahrens

Misha Benjamin Ahrens is a Dutch-American neuroscientist working at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is best known for his work on whole-brain imaging of live larval zebrafish, and various analyses that result from this data.

Early life and education Ahrens was born in the Netherlands in 1981. His undergraduate studies were in mathematics and physics at Cambridge University. He then got a PhD in computational neuroscience at the University College London in the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, in the group of Maneesh Sahani and Jennifer Linden. Ahrens then became a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Florian Engert at Harvard University. In 2012 he moved to Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to start his own lab.

Research and career His lab works on understanding how behavior arises from information processing in distributed brain circuits, neuromodulatory systems, and glial cells of the zebrafish. In particular he specializes in whole brain imaging in live zebrafish, which is possible as the larvae are optically transparent.

Awards and honors In 2019, Ahrens won the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize. Ahrens is a member of the Global Brain collaboration of the Simons Foundation.

Selected publications