Prior to her appointment as department chair in 2018, she served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs in the College of Engineering for a three-year term.
Hagness was born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana where she was encouraged by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology mathematics professor Herb Bailey to consider engineering.
Her graduate student experience working with Alvin Bayliss and Jorge Nocedal on Northwestern's new "Engineering First" curriculum inspired her to pursue a career in academia.
Most recently she has expanded her work into electric-pulse delivery to enhance gene therapy and microwave remote sensing for cranberry crop yield estimation.
"[9] She was also named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021 "for distinguished contributions to computational and experimental applied electromagnetics, with an emphasis on bioelectromagnetics and the development of diagnostic and therapeutic technologies for biomedical applications".