From 1990 to 2000, Hanks served as chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press (OUP). In 1991 to 1992, he was joint principal investigator (with Mary-Claire van Leunen) of the HECTOR project at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Palo Alto, CA. The HECTOR project was a collaboration between OUP and DEC, and although its results were never published, they served as a basis for the "New Oxford Dictionary of English" (1998), while the lexicographers working on it were also guinea-pig users in the development of one of the earliest search engines (AltaVista). On the basis of the COBUILD and HECTOR research in corpus analysis, Hanks began to develop his theory of Norms and Exploitations. From 2001 to 2005, he was adjunct professor of computational lexicography at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, where he worked closely with James Pustejovsky. In 2003, he was appointed consultant and visiting scientist to the Collocations Project and Electronic Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) headed by Christiane Fellbaum. He has also served as a consultant on lexicographical methodology to the Institute of the Czech Language in Prague, to Patakis Publishers in Athens, and others.