Mark Hansen is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2017–24, he also served as an honorary professor at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in physics and philosophy in 1980, and has a Ph.D. in engineering science and a master’s in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, Hansen worked as a physicist at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1988, he has led transportation research projects in urban transportation planning, air transport systems modeling, air traffic flow management, aviation systems performance analysis, aviation safety, aviation environmental analysis, and air transport economics. He has taught graduate and undergraduate transportation courses in economics, systems analysis, planning, probability and statistics, and air transportation.
Hansen is the UC Berkeley co-director of the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, a multi-university consortium sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and principal investigator of the Center for Air Transportation Resilience (CATRes), a major NASA-sponsored initiative to improve the resilience of the air transportation system. He is former chair of Transportation Research Board Committee AV-060, Airport and Airspace Capacity and Delay. He has served as associate editor of Operations Research, Transportation Research E and the Journal of Air Transportation. In 2015, he received the Francis X. McKelvey Award for his outstanding work in relation to the aviation industry from the Transportation Research Board, who noted that “his adeptness at connecting individuals across organizations, even organizations that may seem at odds, resulted in opening up new avenues for discovery and deeper analysis.”