Misha B. Ahrens is a Dutch 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,^[1] and various analyses that result from this data.

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 Englert at Harvard University. In 2012 he moved to Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to start his own lab.^[2]

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 larva are optically transparent.^[3]

• In 2019, Ahrens won the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize.^[4]
• Ahrens is a member of the Global Brain collaboration of the Simons Foundation.^[5]

• Ahrens, Misha B; Li, Jennifer M; Orger, Michael B; Robson, Drew N; Schier, Alexander F; Engert, Florian; Portugues, Ruben (2012). "Brain-wide neuronal dynamics during motor adaptation in zebrafish" (PDF). Nature. 485 (7399). Nature Publishing Group UK London: 471--477.
• Vladimirov, Nikita; Mu, Yu; Kawashima, Takashi; Bennett, Davis V; Yang, Chao-Tsung; Looger, Loren L; Keller, Philipp J; Freeman, Jeremy; Ahrens, Misha B (2014). "Light-sheet functional imaging in fictively behaving zebrafish" (PDF). Nature methods. 11 (9). Nature Publishing Group US New York: 883--884.
• Dunn, Timothy W; Mu, Yu; Narayan, Sujatha; Randlett, Owen; Naumann, Eva A; Yang, Chao-Tsung; Schier, Alexander F; Freeman, Jeremy; Engert, Florian; Ahrens, Misha B (2016). "Brain-wide mapping of neural activity controlling zebrafish exploratory locomotion" (PDF). Elife. 5. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd: e12741.
• Mu, Yu; Bennett, Davis V.; Rubinov, Mikail; Narayan, Sujatha; Yang, Chao-Tsung; Tanimoto, Masashi; Mensh, Brett D.; Looger, Loren L.; Ahrens, Misha B. (2019). "Glia accumulate evidence that actions are futile and suppress unsuccessful behavior" (PDF). Cell. 178 (1). Elsevier: 27--43.