Hugh Groves Hansen was born on August 25, 1917 in Chico, California. He earned an A.B. degree from Oberlin College in 1938, a M.P.A. from University of Michigan in 1946, and a Ph. D. in Economics from the University of California, Riverside, in September 1955.

From July 1951 to July 1952, Hansen was employed as an economist in the U.S. Office of Price Stabilizationin San Francisco. The OPS was established in 1951 as part of a price control law intended to restrain inflation during the Korean War. While not empowered by law to regulate public utility rates, the OPS could appear as a "friend of the court" -- or in this case, the California Public Utilities Commission -- in the national interest, which the San Francisco office undertook to do in opposing a rate increase requested by Pacific Gas & Electric Companyin November 1951. Hansen was intending to present his arguments before the PUC, but was unable to do so when the hearing was established on short notice and he was out of San Francisco on another assignment at the time. Another OPS staff member presented Hansen's findings to the Commission, which acknowledged, but rejected, his arguments in their final decision.

In 1952, Hansen obtained a research fellowship grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles to undertake a study of Central Valley water development. In the summer of 1953, he joined the staff of the Bureau of Public Administration at the University of California, Berkeley,as a Public Administration Analyst. His initial assignment was to conduct a brief study of federal-state relations in the Central Valley. The study lasted over two years and resulted in a detailed report submitted to the California State Assembly Interim Committee on Conservation, Planning, and Public Works.The report, Central Valley Project: Federal or State?, also served as Hansen's dissertation.

After receiving his Ph. D., Hansen served as Professor of Economics at the University of North Dakota and the State University of Iowa.

From February 1958 to October 1959, Hansen worked as Chief of the U.S. Census of Irrigation,a division of the U.S. Census of Agriculture,under Ray Hurley.He was primarily responsible for the direction of reorientation of the 1960 Census and for the working out of new concepts for statistical data gathering and tabulation of irrigation water data. The direction of reorientation was toward an emphasis on quantities of water diverted, used for irrigation, and transferred between drainage basins, and a de-emphasis on the previous practice of measuring characteristics of irrigation organizations. The 1960 Census emphasized "acre feet of water flows" rather than the previous emphasis on "acres irrigated."

Hansen died on June 25, 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming.