John Hanks

As vice president of life sciences at National Instruments, John Hanks is responsible for driving the strategy and execution for the company’s medical and life sciences segment. His responsibilities include managing worldwide sales, key account relationships, strategic partners, system engineering, and life sciences products and solutions.

Prior to taking on this role, Hanks served as the vice president of industrial and embedded product lines for NI. He was responsible for product direction, marketing, and positioning for data acquisition, distributed I/O, motion control, vision, and embedded product areas.

Hanks joined NI in 1990 as a hardware applications engineer and, in 1991, opened field engineering offices in Atlanta to serve customers in five southeastern states. He returned to Austin in 1993 to take on a corporate role as a product marketing manager for real-time and digital signal processing products and NI LabVIEW graphical system design software. In 2000, NI promoted Hanks to director of marketing for industry segments and academics. His team led marketing efforts for academic, automotive, semiconductor, consumer electronics, and optoelectronics customers. During this time, he also helped significantly expand the National Instruments Alliance Partner and product partner programs.

During his tenure in product strategy, marketing, and business management, Hanks lead expansion into new markets by defining and launching products for data acquisition, signal processing, machine vision and image processing, motion control, and embedded. Hanks’ team managed several key company and intellectual property acquisitions that helped complete the NI industrial and embedded product offering. He also made contributions to NI leadership development and internal training programs and has helped shape the culture at National Instruments.

Hanks has served on the board of directors for the Center for the Commercialization of Electric Technologies and as an industry advisor for the Texas A&M Department of Biomedical Engineering. He also often speaks with customers at conferences on topics ranging from “The Rules of Innovation” to “Accelerating Science From the Lab to Market.” Hanks has held market and industry advisory roles for projects funded by the National Science Foundation and has participated in the LeaderShape organization as a career coach for young engineers and scientists.

Hanks graduated with a bachelor of science in engineering from Texas A&M University and received a master of science in engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.