(Capt) Nicholas R. Hanson

Our twenty-eighth recipient, (Captain) Nicholas R. Hanson, will graduate from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School in 2024 with an MBA and MPP.  Nicholas served as a ground intelligence officer during his time in the Marine Corps. As an intelligence officer, Nicholas was assigned to Third Marine Division and subsequently deployed to the Philippines as the Deputy Operations Officer for Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines. He was then assigned as the intelligence officer for First Battalion, Third Marines, and rotated back to East Asia as part of the Unit Deployment Program. He later served as a China Watch Officer at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Joint Intelligence Operations Center (JIOC).  He then took an assignment to work at the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the conclusion of this rotation, he returned to the JIOC and served as head of analysis for the ground forces of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Republic of China national police forces.  He graduated with Distinction from the United States Naval Academy in 2011 with a BS in Arabic.  He was the honor graduate of both the Marine Corps Ground Intelligence Officer Course and the Intelligence and Tactics Instructor Course.  He left graduate school for two years to work at Vannevar Labs, a venture-backed defense technology start-up focused on building technology solutions for the Department of Defense and the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Nicholas currently resides in Watertown, MA.