After earning MSc degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Nijmegen and spending a semester at the University of British Columbia, Chris Heunen finished his PhD studies at Nijmegen in 2009. Directly thereafter, he took up a prestigious Rubicon Fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research at the University of Oxford, during which time he was also a visiting researcher at the California Institute of Technology. His work was awarded the biennial 2012 Birkhoff-von Neumann prize. In 2013 he was awarded an EPSRC Research Fellowship, and in 2015 he joined the University of Edinburgh.