Jeffrey Heinz is a Professor of Linguistics who conducts research in several related areas including theoretical and mathematical linguistics, theoretical computer science, computational learning theory, robotic planning and control and artificial intelligence. In addition to dozens of publications in journals and peer-reviewed book chapters and conference proceedings, he has co-authored a book on grammatical inference for computational linguists, edited two books and guest-edited special issues of the journals Machine Learning and Phonology.

He earned his PhD from UCLA in 2007 and spent ten years as a professor at the University of Delaware before coming to Stony Brook in 2017. The Linguistic Society of America recognized Heinz with its 2017 Early Career Award for his "contributions leading to a new computational science of inference and learning as applied to language."