After studying at Aachen University and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heeck received his Ph.D. degree in 2014 from Heidelberg University in Germany. Following that, he held a postdoctoral position at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, supported by a fellowship from Belgium’s national science foundation, Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS). In 2018, he began research as an assistant project scientist at the University of California, Irvine, supported by a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Since 2020 he is an Assistant Professor of Physics at UVA.