James Hetrick

Dr. James Hetrick is a Professor of the Physics Department and Assistant Director of the Masters 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 at the South Pole Station in Antarctica where he studied 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. At Pacific, Professor Hetrick teaches a variety of classes, including courses like “Cosmology” and “The Physics of Music”. In addition to his teaching and administrative roles, he is an active researcher in the field of "lattice quantum chromo-dynamics". Using some of the largest computers in the world, Prof. Hetrick constructs models of the fields and interactions between quarks and other subatomic particles in order to explore their behavior.