Heiney is a Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an author of more than 130 refereed publications, most having to do with x-ray scattering in some form. He is a member of The American Chemical Society, The American Crystallographic Association, and other scientific societies, and a Fellow of The American Physical Society. See his personal home page for more information.

Along with Prof. Karen Winey, Heiney is responsible for the Multiple-Angle X-ray Scattering Facility at the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter. This facility is open on a paid basis to scientists outside Penn.

Datasqueeze was originally written for analysis of x-ray data at the University of Pennsylvania. All versions of the program have been extensively tested at Penn. Datasqueeze Software was founded in 2002 to disseminate the program to a wider audience. It is now used in more than 100 laboratories worldwide.