Heiney is an EmeritusProfessor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an author of more than 164 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 is a Fellow of The American Physical Society. Heiney has produced a series of tutorial videos on X-ray scattering techniques.

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. It is now used in more than 100 laboratories worldwide. For a number of years it was sold at datasqueezesoftware.com, but since February 2018 it has been available as freeware.