Hansen received a BS in computer science from
Memphis State University in 1981 and a PhD in computer science from the
University of Utah in 1987. From 1989 to 1997, he was a Technical Staff Member in the Advanced Computing Laboratory (ACL) at
Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he formed and directed the visualization efforts. He was a Bourse de Chateaubriand PostDoc Fellow at
INRIA in
Rocquencourt,
France in 1987 and 1988. Since 1998, he has been a full
professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah. In 2019, he was named a Distinguished Professor of Computing at the University of Utah. He was a visiting scientist at
INRIA-
Rhône-Alpes in the GRAVIR group in 2004-2005 and a visiting professor at the
Joseph Fourier University in
Grenoble in 2011-2012. In 2005, he won the
IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award for his "seminal work on tools for understanding large-scale scientific data sets". In 2017, he was awarded the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics "Career Award" in recognition for his contributions to large scale data visualization, including advances in parallel and volume rendering, novel interaction techniques, and techniques for exploiting hardware; for his leadership in the community as an educator, program chair, and editor; and for providing vision for the development and support of the field. He was associate editor-in-chief of
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics from 2003 to 2007, and again from 2014 to 2018. He was elected an
IEEE Fellow in 2012. ==Books==