Curriculum Vitae

Lena Hornkohl studied law in Heidelberg and Uppsala. After completing the First State Examination in 2014, she undertook her legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court of Karlsruhe, including a stage at the European Commission, and completed the Second State Examination in 2016. In 2019, she obtained an LL.M. in European Law and Economic Analysis from the College of Europe in Bruges. She was awarded her doctorate (Dr. iur.) by Heidelberg University in 2020 with a dissertation on the protection of confidential information in private enforcement of EU competition law. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge (2017), the University of Graz (2022), and the University of Chile (2023).

From 2014 to 2019, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Chair of Civil Law, Commercial, Corporate and Business Law, European Law and Comparative Law (Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Peter-Christian Müller-Graff) at Heidelberg University. In 2019, she joined an international law firm in Brussels as a lawyer specialising in European competition law. In 2020, she became Senior Research Fellow in the Department of European and Comparative Procedural Law at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law. Since 2022, she has been Tenure-Track Professor of European Law at the University of Vienna. In parallel, she is pursuing her habilitation at Heidelberg University under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Burkhard Hess, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Thomas Pfeiffer and Prof. Dr. Christian Heinze.

In 2017, Lena Hornkohl received the Young Researcher Award of the German Society for Comparative Law (Gesellschaft für Rechtsvergleichung). Her publications have been repeatedly nominated for the Antitrust Writing Awards, which she won in 2026 in the private enforcement category. Her studies and research stays were supported by scholarships from the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the European Commission and the Federal State of Styria.

She is Co-Principal Investigator of the third-party funded research project “Empowering Growth: State Aid and Industrial Policy in the European Union” and a member of the project team conducting the study on the simplification and review of the Foreign Subsidies Regulation for the European Commission.

She is President of IUS Omnibus, Advisor to CELIS, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Women in Competition Law Network Austria (WCNA). She organises numerous (including externally funded) academic events and is particularly committed to fostering early-career scholars as a founding member of the “Early Career Competition Law Scholars Conferences” and the “Max Planck European Law Group”, as well as of the “Ruben Perea Award for Early Career Competition Lawyers and Economists”.

Lena Hornkohl has taught at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the University of Trier, Heidelberg University, the European University Institute, Ghent University, the University of Vienna Summer School, the University of Applied Sciences for the Administration of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Justice Academy of North Rhine-Westphalia. She is actively involved in both the European Law Moot Court and the Austrian Competition Law Moot Court.

She serves as editor of the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice (JECLAP), Multimedia und Recht – Zeitschrift für IT-Recht und Recht der Digitalisierung (MMR), the EU Law Live Competition Corner, and the Kluwer Competition Law Blog.

She is a member of Amnesty International Deutschland e.V., Arbeitskreis Europäische Integration e.V., Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA) e.V., Competition Litigation Forum e.V., Deutsch-Französische Juristenvereinigung e.V., Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationales Recht e.V., Gesellschaft für Rechtsvergleichung e.V., Gesellschaft Junge Zivilrechtswissenschaft (GJZ) e.V. und Österreichische Gesellschaft für Europarecht (ÖGER) e.V.