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 ==