Thijs Janzen started keeping aquariums at the age of ten. Upon completing high school, he started the study of Biology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He completed his Bachelors and Masters, and continued to obtain his PhD at the University of Groningen. Part of his PhD thesis involved a trip to Lake Tanganyika, where he collected community composition data of cichlid communities. Currently, he is working as a scientific programmer at the University of Groningen. Apart from his scientific endeavors, Thijs writes regularly for the NVC (Dutch Cichlid Society) where he reports on Cichlids in science.