John Hanks

Areas of interest: Sensors for machine learning, machine vision, multi-spectral sensing, and wearables

John Hanks is an experienced industry veteran with more than 30 years of corporate experience at National Instruments, Maxim Integrated and Siemens Medical Systems with roles leading engineering, R&D and product management teams. These brought to market more than $3B of new hardware and software product designs. 

While at Maxim Integrated, he led the Advanced R&D team responsible for low-cost, low-power sensors designs for wearable, automotive, and industrial sensors. Maxim is a leading semiconductor supplier of wearable optical heart rate and oxygen sensor modules for phones and smart watches with volumes exceeding 400M units. 

While at National Instruments, he held positions as vice president of Life Sciences and Healthcare and vice president of Product Management. At National Instruments, Hanks was a catalyst that brought together teams to start several successful product lines for machine vision, motion control, wireless sensing and data acquisition. As vice president of Life Sciences and Healthcare, Hanks led teams that developed commercial subsystems, prototypes and manufacturing test systems for optical coherence tomography imaging, ultrasound probes, mass spectrometry, DNA sequencing and molecular diagnostics devices. His efforts contributed to National Instruments being named 12 times best places to work for by Fortune Magazine and to delivering consistent, profitable growth from $40M to $1.2B.

Hanks was the author or co-author of more than 70 published articles and often is a corporate keynote speaker on innovation. Hanks brings a wealth of industry knowledge, engineering and product management, intellectual property licensing, and commercialization experience to Texas A&M. Other interests include affordable prototyping and design, technology market validation and disruptive technology innovation.