Meet the Leadership Team

Executive Vice Chancellor for Research, Analytics and Data

As executive vice chancellor of the new Office of Innovation, Data, Evidence and Analytics, John J. Hetts, PhD, leads the development and delivery of information technology and security services, student-centered technology-focused initiatives, and evidence-based reporting and evaluation.

Hetts joined the Chancellor’s Office in 2019 as visiting executive for research and data in the California Community Colleges Office and has helped to reimagine the role of data, research, and evidence, working to rebuild that capacity within the system office to better serve colleges and their 1.8 million students.

A nationally recognized leader in intersegmental educational pathways in higher education, Hetts has spent the last two decades working to better understand and recognize student capacity to make certain that all students receive fair credit for their skills and the full opportunity to put those skills to use to achieve their educational goals and aspirations. He currently represents the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office as a Board Member of the Governing Board of the State of California Cradle to Career System, leads the statewide Student Metrics Advisory Committee, and has served as a member of the Multiple Measures Assessment Project research team, the Cradle to Career Research Subcommittee, both the University of California’s Standardized Testing Feasibility Steering Committee and Work Group, the California Guided Pathways Advisory Committee, and the AB 705 Implementation Workgroup, and has been both a California Education Policy Fellow and a Complete College America Fellow.

Formerly, Hetts served as the senior director of Data Science for Educational Results Partnership, which under the leadership of the Chancellor’s Office manages CalPASS Plus, California’s voluntary intersegmental data system, and the improvement and accountability tool known as LaunchBoard. Before that, he served as the director of institutional research at Long Beach City College, where his collaborations on modeling student assessment helped lead to system-wide reforms of remedial education.

Hetts earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University followed by a doctorate in social psychology with specializations in measurement and psychometrics as well as political psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Visiting Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research, Analytics and Data

Terrence Willett has over 25 years of experience in institutional research and planning. Before joining the Chancellor’s Office as the Visiting Assistant Vice Chancellor of Data, Visualization, and Research, he was Dean of Research, Planning, and Institutional Effectiveness at Cabrillo College, where he had been a math and science tutor when a student there. Mr. Willett also worked at Gavilan College and for the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS) as Director of Research and a Senior Researcher with the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges (RP Group) on the Multiple Measures Assessment Project (MMAP) and other efforts including Student Support (Re)Defined. He has also been a Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) coach for several colleges. He served on accreditation teams for Ohlone and Rio Hondo colleges as well as on the AB 705 Implementation Workgroup, as an alternate on the Matriculation Advisory Committee, and on the CTE Outcomes Survey Advisory Committee. He was a co-lead for the CCCGIS project to develop a repository of shape files for all California community college districts. His recent publications include a chapter titled “Assessing Equity with Traditional and Novel Metrics in Times of Change” in Exemplars of Assessment in Higher Education, Volume Two, and co-author of a chapter on remediation reform in Empowering the Community College First-Year Composition Teacher.

Mr. Willett earned a B.A. in Psychology in 1991 from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.S. in Environmental Studies from San José State University in 1998 with his thesis research "Spiders and Other Arthropods as Indicators in Old‐Growth Versus Logged Redwood Stands" conducted in and around Big Basin Redwoods State Park.