Biografia

CHRIS A. HANSEN, P.E.

Assistant Surgeon General

Rear Admiral, USPHS (ret.)

Chris A. Hansen was born on September 17, 1915 in Guelph, North Dakota. His career included service as a county engineer, a state level engineer, as a Public Health Service (PHS) Commissioned Corps officer, and as Vice President of Georgetown University. While a PHS officer, he contributed to major segments of the Service including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from its beginnings as the Malaria Control in War Areas program, the National institutes of Health, and the several PHS organizational units containing the environmental health programs of the Service.

Hansen received a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from the North Dakota State College in Fargo in 1937 and a Master of Science Degree in Sanitary Engineering from the University of North Carolina, School of Public Health in 1942.

After graduation from undergraduate school, Hansen worked for a short time as a county engineer in Dickey County, North Dakota and then moved to Georgia where he served for three years as a public health engineer in a joint program with the Fulton County Health Department and the Georgia State Health Department in Atlanta, Georgia.

In July 1937 in Albany, Georgia, Chris Hansen married Mary Elizabeth Runice of Fargo, North Dakota. They had two daughters Elizabeth and Kristie. Mary Hanson passed away in 1992.

Hansen was commissioned as a PHS engineer in May of 1941 and then took a leave of absence in June of 1941 to attend graduate school at the University of North Carolina. He returned to active duty as a sanitary engineer in Atlanta, Georgia in June of 1942 shortly after the beginning of World War II, and was assigned to the Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) program, a predecessor organization of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The MCWA was directed to developing mosquito-free zones within a one-mile radius around each military and industrial establishment serving the war effort in fif­teen southeastern states, as well as California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U. S. related Caribbean areas. The program was later assigned responsibility for control of dengue, typhus, and other com­municable diseases.

http://www.usphsengineers.org/History/Bio/C_Hansen.htm