Kai Lawonn pursued his studies from 2006 to 2011 in Mathematics and Physics at Freie Universität Berlin, culminating in the completion of his diploma. Following that, he undertook his doctoral studies from 2012 to 2014 at Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg in the field of Computer Science, obtaining his Venia Legendi in Computer Visualization in 2017. Between 2015 and 2019, he served as a Junior Professor for Medical Visualization at the University of Koblenz-Landau, and in 2019, he transitioned to become a Junior Professor at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, financially supported by the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung.
As of 2021, Lawonn holds the position of Professor for Visualization and Exploratory Data Analysis at the same university. His research group specializes in the visualization of medical data, illustrative visualization, data analysis, visual analytics, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, among other areas.
Noteworthy accolades in his career include the Eurographics Award for the Best Dissertation in 2016, the EuroVis – Young Researcher Award in 2020, the DFG Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Prize in 2021, and being recognized in the Capital’s Top 40 under 40 in the same year.