Heeger was a member of the 2015 Nuclear Physics Long Range Planning Group and the US ATLAS Project Advisory Group, and has served on review committees for the United States Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC).

[2] Heeger is studying the nature of neutrinos with the CUORE double beta decay experiment, performing R&D with Project 8 towards a novel experiment to measure neutrino mass,[2] and assembling Charge Readout Planes at Yale Wright Laboratory for the DUNE detectors, which is an experiment that will enable the study of the matter-antimatter imbalance in the Universe and determine the ordering of neutrino mass states.

From 2015 to 2024, Heeger was the PI and spokesperson of the PROSPECT experiment, which aims to make a precision measurement of reactor antineutrinos and search for sterile neutrinos[3] at very short baselines.

In 2008 he received Outstanding Junior Investigator awards from DOE Nuclear Physics for the investigation of neutrino properties with bolometric detectors and from DOE High Energy Physics for the measurement of the neutrino mixing angle theta13 at Daya Bay.

Heeger shared the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as a member of three collaborations: SNO, KamLAND, and Daya Bay.