Dr. Heinze earned his PhD at Florida Atlantic University and his MBA and Bachelor's Degree at California State University, Chico. He has been teaching business and IT courses for over 20 years and developed SPC's upper division data science subplan and the State of Florida's State College curriculum guideline for cloud technologies. 

In addition to his years of teaching, he worked as an instructional designer for Silicon Valley’s TCT Technical Training where he received Designer of the Quarter and Employee of the Quarter awards; after that, he worked as a corporate trainer and project manager for Ameriquest Mortgage, running training projects for the corporate intranet, Lotus Notes, and a contact management system. He later worked for Agilent Technologies creating web-based training modules and in 1999 built a web design business with Siri co-founder Darren Haas. 

Heinze's 2009 European Journal of Information Systems publication "Why college undergraduates choose IT: a multi-theoretical perspective" is one of the seminal pieces on IT career choice and was nominated for Paper of the Year at PACIS.

Dr. Heinze has also worked as a graphic designer, illustrator, writer, and music producer with clients and distributors including Disney, Nickelodeon, NBC, TNT, Cosmos-Maya, Simon & Schuster, Applewood Books, Oracle, The NBA, Parlophone, Sony Music, Decibel Records, DJ International, and more. 

His oil paintings (www.nathanheinzeart.com) have been featured in multiple Florida galleries and shows, and his pieces can be found in the private collections of music luminaries such as Fred Vail and Dolly Parton.