After her Phd, she carried out
postdoctoral research at the
Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge with
John Graham White. Ahringer became a group leader in the department of
genetics in Cambridge in 1996, before moving to the
Gurdon Institute in 1998. Her laboratory carried out the first systematic inactivation of the majority of genes in any animal by constructing and screening a genome-wide
RNAi library for
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Ahringer's research group studies the regulation of chromatin structure and function in gene expression and genome organization using the nematode
C. elegans as a model to understand development and disease. The Ahringer Lab research is funded by the
Wellcome Trust. and a
Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2007. She delivered the
Francis Crick lecture prize of the
Royal Society in 2004. In 2020 she was awarded the
George W. Beadle Award of the
Genetics Society of America for outstanding contributions to genetics. She was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. She serves as a member of the scientific
advisory board of the
Medical Research Council (MRC) along with many other eminent scientists. ==Personal life==