Thors Hans Hansson received his PhD from the University of Göteborg in 1979, while he did his PhD work at the Rutherford laboratory in the United Kingdom. In 1979 he became a fellow at Nordita and after that a postdoc at MIT and a fellow at CERN. In 1985 he became an assistant professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook, before moving to Sweden and Stockholm University in 1988. During his years as a Professor of Theoretical Physics he has been a visiting scientist at Princeton University and Rockefeller universities in 2002-2003 and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Theorietical Sciences (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Notre Dame) in 2005. Thors Hans Hansson is the director of Nordita since 2016.

Hans' field of research was originally high energy physics where he worked on hadron phenomenology and high temperature QCD. Later he moved to condensed matter physics where he has worked on various aspects of topological matter, in particular the fractional quantum Hall effect, and topological superconductivity.

He is a member of the Swedish Physical Society, the American Physical Society, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Committee for Physics.