For his work in palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions and organic synthesis, Heck was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with the Japanese chemists Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki.

After postdoctoral research at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland with Vladimir Prelog, and then back at UCLA, Heck took a position with the Hercules Corporation in Wilmington, Delaware in 1956, working initially on polymer chemistry.

[4][5] This led to the development of the Heck reaction, which began with his investigation during the late 1960s of the coupling of arylmercury compounds with olefins using palladium as a catalyst.

[3] This work was published in a series of seven consecutive articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society for which Heck was the sole author.

[6] During the early 1970s, Tsutomu Mizoroki independently reported the use of the less toxic aryl halides as the coupling partner in the reaction.

[14] These palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions are now widely practiced in organic synthesis, including for the manufacture of pharmaceutical drugs such as naproxen.

[19][20] On October 6, 2010, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded Heck the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis".