Dr. James Hetrick is a Professor of Physics and the Director of the Master’s degree program in Data Science at the University of the Pacific.
After finishing his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Hetrick spent 13 months (wintered over) at the South Pole Station in Antarctica studying cosmic rays, the solar wind, the auroras, and the earth’s magnetosphere.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in theoretical particle physics and went on to hold postdoctoral research positions at ETH in Zürich, Switzerland, the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Washington University in St. Louis, before coming to the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California.
After 17 years as Chair of the Physics Department, Dr. Hetrick now directs the Masters degree programs in Data Science at Pacific’s San Francisco and Stockton campuses. He has taught a wide variety of classes in both the Physics and Data Science, including “Cosmology”, “The Physics of Music”, “Big History”, “Analytics Storytelling”, and “Linear Algebra for Data Science”.
In addition to his teaching and administrative roles, Dr. Hetrick is an NSF-funded researcher in the field of lattice quantum chromodynamics with over
150 publications. Using supercomputers at various national research centers, Dr. Hetrick simulates the physics of quarks and explores models of what the Higgs particle might really be. This work involves very high dimensional monte carlo techniques, state-of-the-art numerical linear algebra, and advanced methods of statistical analysis.