[1] Chanson is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland, where he has been since 1990, having previously enjoyed an industrial career for six years.

His main field of expertise is environmental fluid mechanics and hydraulic engineering, both in terms of theoretical fundamentals, physical and numerical modelling.

The textbook The Hydraulics of Open Channel Flow: An Introduction has been translated into Chinese (Hydrology Bureau of Yellow River Conservancy Committee) and Spanish (McGraw Hill Interamericana) and the second edition appeared in 2004.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, Environmental and Water Resources Institute (ASCE-EWRI) presented him with the award for the best practice paper in the ASCE Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering ("Energy Dissipation and Air Entrainment in Stepped Storm Waterway", Chanson and Toombes 2002), the 2018 Honorable Mention Paper Award for "Minimum Specific Energy and Transcritical Flow in Unsteady Open-Channel Flow" by Castro-Orgaz and Chanson (2016) in the ASCE Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering and both 2020 and 2021 Outstanding Reviewer Award of the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering.

In 1999 he was awarded a Doctor of Engineering from the University of Queensland for his outstanding research achievements in gas-liquid bubbly flows.