Currently he is the professor of geophysics and civil engineering at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and one of the world's leading experts on seismology.

There he worked as a research geophysicist in their Pasadena office from 1979 until July 1995, at which time he was the USGS project chief of the Southern California Seismic Network.

He is perhaps best known in the scientific community for his several contributions in source inversions and specially his influential 1990 paper "Evidence for and Implications of self healing pulses of slip in earthquakes",[1] where he clearly provided evidence for the existence of another mode of rupture for earthquakes; namely the pulse like mode, other than the widely accepted crack like model that was adopted at that time.

Heaton's work is aimed at a more complete understanding of the nature of ground shaking close to large earthquakes.

One of the approaches is the 3D finite element modeling for regions in the crust with ruptures occurring on fault planes controlled by dynamic friction and looking for conditions that are required to sustain the observed heterogeneous characteristics of stress and slip in cycles of earthquakes.

With Deborah E. Smith, they generated those fractal stress tensors and used them to produce catalogs of earthquake locations and focal mechanisms.

Also the model predicts that the strength of the crust should be a scale dependent property, a topic which is currently being further investigated in Heaton's group.

The virtual seismologist, which is an innovative earthquake early warning technique, is an example of the achievements of Heaton's group in that field.

Once the point starts to slip, it will continue to do that until waves are reflected back from the ends of the fault carrying information that the earthquake has already reached its full rupture length.