Heinson worked for the BBC's engineering research department before emigrating to California in 1989. There, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Irvine on a rare kaon decay experiment E791 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1992, she began working at the University of California Riverside as a Research Physicist[4] where she worked on the DØ collaboration at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She established and led the DØ Single Top working group from 1995 to 2009.[3] In 1997, she co-authored the paper "Single Top Quarks at the Fermilab Tevatron," which laid the conceptual foundations for the next decade of top quark experimental research.[2] The observation of the production of single top quarks resulted from proton-antiproton collisions measured by the DZero detector which is the world's highest-energy particle collider.
In 2009, under her leadership the DØ published its first ever observation of single top quark production.[5]
Under her leadership, the single top working group discovered the first evidence of single top quark production at Fermi Labs Tevatron.
Through 2008-11 Heinson was a fellow in the Division of Particles and Fields Distinction
and organization under American Physical Society [4]
From 2010 to 2012 Heinson was participated in the American Association For The Advancement of Science as a fellow in section on Physics.[4]
After 20 years of research at the University of California Riverside, she retired in 2012.[3]
