[5] Since 2015 he has been Chair of the European Commission's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors,[6] and since May 2017 he has been President of the SESAME Council.

He then obtained his PhD 1977 at the University of Heidelberg under Joachim Heintze for his study of neutral decay modes of the Ψ(3686).

Having been offered a full professorship for experimental physics at the University of Hamburg, Heuer returned to DESY in 1998.

In 2011 Heuer gave a talk The High Energy Frontier Past, Present and Future at the international symposium on subnuclear physics held in Vatican City.

[10] Since November 2015, Heuer has been a member of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors set up by the European Commission.