Eren was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1981. He attended the Robert College High School in Istanbul, where he received his Science diploma in 1999. A consummate pursuer of interests he received the unlikely combination of a BS in Electrical Engineering and Comparative Literature from Northwestern University in 2003. As an undergraduate Eren was funded by the NU Undergraduate Summer Research grant for his research in wireless channel modeling for video transmission, which he continued to work on funded by the Motorola Undergraduate Research grant his Senior year. For his Comparative Literature finishing capstone he humbly wrote on "Buddhist Medicine for Existential Suffering."

Less than a year after graduating Eren returned to NU to join IVPL and received his MS in 2006, having written his thesis on proposed scalable extensions to H.264 CABAC entropy coding. He is currently working with Prof. Katsaggelos on his PhD thesis on Rate Control for Video Compression Systems.

Between 2003-2009 Eren was with Ingenient Technologies, where he designed real-time embedded video compression systems for a variety of devices from cell phones to set top boxes to broadcasting infrastructure.