WOMEN IN MANUFACTURING: Hannah Henley

President, INFICON Inc.

by Mary Beth Roach

Starting with INFICON Inc. in 2010 as a product specialist, Hannah Henley has already become president and head of Intelligent Sensor Solutions at the East Syracuse-based company, which she also referred to as INFICON USA. Two other presidents are in Europe and they all report to the company’s CEO.

As president of INFICON Inc., Henley also oversees the U.S. locations in Massachusetts, Kansas and California, with more than 350 employees at the East Syracuse facility and 450 throughout the U.S. Her Intelligent Sensor Solutions team includes R&D, product management and manufacturing of products that service the semiconductor market, defense market and new energy, she said.

“We’re responsible for the R&D and engineering development of sensor technologies, gas analysis instrumentation and smart manufacturing software serving the semiconductor market primarily but going into applications used for high precision optical coding, OLED manufacturing or other types of display production and also really specialized portable lab type of instruments that are used for military and defense applications,” she said.

After graduating from Clarkson University in 2010 with a degree in chemical engineering, she started with INFICON as a product specialist, providing technical support for some of the company’s mass spectrometer product line. From there, she navigated into the semiconductor applications through work she had done on some products for research and development that would later be industrialized for high volume semiconductor applications. She would move on to product management for many of the sensors and then market management for the semiconductor market. She would later assume market management for all of INFICON’s markets and she did an international assignment in Taiwan in 2022. Upon returning to the states and Central New York, she took over as president of Intelligent Sensor Solutions. And while working, she was able to earn a master’s degree, also for Clarkson, in engineering management.

Her career has taken a different path than she had anticipated.

“I did not anticipate that my journey would look like this. I studied chemical engineering and I really assumed that I would be working on pureplay R&D type of work and I did some pre-professional internships in those environments,” she explained.

But Henley found that something was missing. She said she wanted to understand the big picture, to be able to “zoom out and see holistically what challenges we were trying solve.”

With INFICON, she said she has been able to gain exposure to the commercial side of the business, in addition to the technical.

“INFICON is a company that really encouraged me to go and pursue those areas and empowered me to do that as well. I think it was really fantastic to gain a lot of customer-facing experience. That was critical for me — really being able to be collaborative with the customer, understand their problem and think about how the two companies could grow together,” she explained. She sees it as being formative for her career.

She credits the company, too, with encouraging her to get her master’s degree and pointed to the company’s specialized development and leadership opportunities.

Collaborating as part of a high-performing team has been key to much of Henley’s success.

“I have been fortunate to work on many challenging projects that range from new technology development to manufacturing expansions to new customer acquisitions. Most of these were incredibly tough, but the part that made it so rewarding was the group of people that came together to both leverage and challenge each other,” she explained.

The team brought a sensor technology to market for an application that is now quite critical for leading edge chip manufacturing.

“At the time, many in the industry were skeptical it would work,” she said. “It was a risk INFICON collaborated on together with the customer and now this enables the world’s leading edge AI chips. I’m proud of the technology, but even more proud of the way the INFICON team came together to launch and scale that technology.”

Henley’s career has not been without its challenges, but she brings a positive perspective to overcoming obstacles.

She explained that when she stepped into more senior roles, she used to find herself focusing on what she didn’t know and what she’d have to learn rather than concentrate on what she is bringing to the new job.

Her advice: “Think about everything you’re bringing to the role and think about everything you don’t know as an opportunity to grow. Lean into the things that you don’t know and use it as an exciting thing rather than a time of being fearful.”