BIOGRAPHY

Robert C. Hansen was born in 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a BSEE degree from the Missouri School of Mines, Rolla in 1949 and a PhD degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1955.

He was an electronic technician in the U. S. Navy in 1945-46. From
1949-55 Dr. Hansen worked in the University of Illinois Antenna Laboratory. At Hughes Aircraft Co. he was section head in the Microwave Laboratory working on antennas. In 1960 Dr. Hansen became a senior staff member in the Telecommunication Laboratory of STL, Inc. (now TRW). At Aerospace Corp. (1961-67) he was Associate Director of Satellite Control, then director of the Test Mission Analysis Office, and finally Operations Group director of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Systems Engineering Office. During 1967-70 he was with KMS Industries in Ann Arbor, MI. Since 1971 he has been a consulting engineer for antennas and systems related problems.

Dr. Hansen was perhaps the first to simulate antennas on a mainframe computer (asymmetric spherical harmonics on ILLIAC, circa 1953). His work on antennas has been eclectic: he published first papers on low noise antennas, near-field power densities, reduced RCS measurements, minimum spot size of focused apertures, inductive loading of short monopoles, segmented aperture SAR, one-parameter circular aperture distributions, GTD analysis of compact ranges, S/N performance of aperiodic monopoles, focal region characteristics of focused arrays, superconducting antenna matching loss, measurement distance effects on Bayliss difference patterns, Gibbsian models for edge effects in scanning arrays, sub-array quantization lobe decollimation, and analysis of the contrawound toroidal helix antenna.

Dr. Hansen is a Life Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of IEE, and was President of the Antennas and Propagation Society (1964 and 1980), and Director IEEE (1975). He was chair of U.S. Commission B of URSI (1967-69), and is a registered Professional Engineer in California and England. He is a member of the American Physical Society, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Phi Kappa Phi. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree by the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1975. The University of Illinois Electrical Engineering Department gave him a Distinguished Alumnus award in 1981, and the College of Engineering awarded a Distinguished Alumnus Service Medal in 1986. The IEEE AESS Barry Carlton best paper prize was awarded in 1991. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1992.

Dr. Hansen has written over 100 papers on electromagnetics (most recently in 2001), has been an Assoc. Editor of Microwave Journal (1960-95), was Assoc. Editor of Radio Science (1967-69), Assoc. Editor of Microwave Engineer's Handbook (1971). Books are Microwave Scanning Antennas, (1964), Significant Phased Array Papers (1973), Geometric Theory of Diffraction (1981), Moment Methods in Antennas and Scattering (1990), Phased Array Antennas (1998),(2009),and Electrically Small, Superdirective, and Superconducting Antennas (2006).

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