[1] He is the Director of the Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and winner of the Walter Boas Medal in 1985.
[citation needed] From 1972–73, he was a guest scientist at the University of Reading (JJ Thomson Physical Laboratory) in the UK.
From 1999–2003, he was a guest scientist at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) at the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy).
[2] Hannaford is the institutional director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics at Swinburne University of Technology.
While at CSIRO in the 1970s to the 1990s, he pioneered new techniques in high-resolution and time-resolved laser spectroscopy, which have been important for characterization of the spectroscopic properties of a wide range of atoms.