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Benjamin Hanson is a second year Ph.D. student at the University of California San Diego in the Aerospace Engineering department, co-advised by Dr. Aaron Rosengren and Dr. Thomas Bewley. His research centers around state estimation and uncertainty propagation in two different regimes: the first is cislunar space, a regime where the chaotic dynamics induce complex orbits that are difficult to orbit and document, and the second is probabilistic search algorithms for non-evasive and evasive targets. Benjamin is a 2023 NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity (NSTGRO) fellow and a 2023 AFRL SFFP graduate student.

Benjamin graduated summa cum laude from the Colorado School of Mines in May of 2022 with a B.S. in Engineering Physics, a minor in Robotics and Intelligent Systems, and an area of special interest in Space and Planetary Sciences Engineering. He was a member of Dr. Ning Wu's chemical and biological engineering lab for two years, working in the field of synthesis and propulsion of microbots. His contributions earned him co-authorship on a publication in Langmuir, entitled "Synthesis and Propulsion of Magnetic Dimers under Orthogonally Applied Electric and Magnetic Fields", with multiple presentations in the Colorado School of Mines Undergraduate Research Symposiums. Additionally, Benjamin worked with Dr. Frederic Sarazin on his research in cosmic ray detection via simulation, specifically for the calibration of the Auger@TA detection array. For this work, Benjamin received "Best Technical Project by an Individual" in the 2022 Colorado School of Mines Senior Engineering Physics symposium.

In 2021, Benjamin was accepted into the National Science Foundation (NSF) REU in the University of Florida's astronomy department. Benjamin was advised by Dr. Paul Torrey and worked on developing a Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework for predicting the properties of galaxies via decomposition of galactic spectral energy distributions. Benjamin presented his work at the Summer 2022 AAS Goddard symposium in Pasadena, CA, where he earned a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award Honorable Mention.