Sue Hanson
From September 11 Memories
Sue Kim Hanson was a lab technician and student. A resident of Groton, Massachusetts she attended and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She later earned her Master of Arts at Boston University and was a doctoral candidate there, performing a series of challenging experiments creating mice that lacked the Interleukin-16 gene to study the role that the gene might play in both asthma and AIDS.
Hanson died at 35 in the crash of United Airlines Flight 175 during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. She was traveling with her husband, Peter Hanson and daughter, Christine Hanson. They were on the way to Disneyland and then a trip to visit Sue's relatives.
The Hanson family has been honored with various memorials throughout the United States. In 2002 Sue was posthumously awarded a doctorate degree in Pathology from Boston University, which has established an annual lecture to be held on September 11 in Sue's honor. In 2003 an orchestral elegy titled Christine's Lullaby, written in Christine's honor, was premiered in Minnesota. Also in 2003, the Boston University Medical Center dedicated a pediatrics treatment room to the Hansons. In 2005, Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo opened the Hanson Exploration Station, a state-of-the-art educational and corporate meeting space named in the Hanson's honor.
Sue is survived by her grandmother, Ok-Hee Kim, and her brothers, Stanley and John, all of California.
