Professor Heckman earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2008 and his PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University in 2012, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. He had postdoctoral appointments at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC as an NRC Research Associate, and in the Autonomous Robotics and Perception Group at CU Boulder as a Research Scientist, before joining the faculty there in 2016.