Visualization, Visual Analytics and Virtual Reality in Medicine

Noeska Smit was born in 1983 in Heenvliet, the Netherlands. She became a licensed radiographer in Rotterdam in 2005. Afterwards, she obtained her master's in computer science with a minor in biomedical engineering in 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. At the same institute, she defended her PhD thesis on interactive visualization for anatomy education and surgical planning in 2016. She moved to Bergen, Norway, to join the visualization research group at the Department of Informatics as a tenure-track Associate Professor in medical visualization in 2016. Since 2019, she holds a position as a senior researcher at the Mohn Medical Imaging and Visualization (MMIV) center at the Department of Radiology of the Haukeland University Hospital in Norway. She is part of the leadership team at this interdisciplinary center. She leads a team researching multimodal medical data visualization. In her interdisciplinary research, she works on novel interactive visualization approaches for improved exploration, analysis, and communication of multimodal medical imaging data. Her work has been awarded with a Dirk Bartz prize for Visual Computing in Medicine in 2019 and the Best Interdisciplinary Presentation Award, awarded at the Computer Graphics International conference in 2020.

Kai Lawonn was born in 1985 in Berlin, Germany. He received the diploma in mathematics in 2011 (minor in physics) and a Ph.D. in 2014 for a thesis on illustrative visualization on medical data sets from the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg. In 2015 he moved to Koblenz where he become a Junior professor at the University of Koblenz-Landau for Medical Visualization. In 2019 he moved to Jena, Germany, where he is now a full professor for Visualization and Explorative Data Analysis. His work on visualization was awarded with the Best Ph.D. Award 2016 of the Eurographics Awards Programme, the EuroVis Young Researcher Award in 2020, and the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize in 2021. His research interests include vessel visualization, exploration of blood flow, illustrative visualization, and since recently visualization of machine learning techniques.