Horacio Heinzen got his Doctor (rerum naturae) degree from Georg August Universität in Göttingen, Germany. He has been a Full Professor of Pharmacognosy and Natural Products since 1998 at the Faculty of Chemistry, Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay. 

In 2005, he founded the Grupo de Análisis de Contaminantes Traza (GACT), the first academic group in Uruguay focused on modern trace analysis of organic contaminants. His research interests include analytical method development for trace organic contaminants in food and the environment, method validation, and data treatment for food safety and environmental sustainability. He also works on spectroscopic structure elucidation of bioactive compounds and metabolomics studies using NMR and mass spectrometry. 

He supervised 20 PhD theses in Uruguay, Brazil, and Spain and has conducted over 25 training courses on pesticide residue analysis in the last decade. He has published 173 scientific articles and 12 book chapters and has lectured at more than 35 scientific events. He co-edited a thematic issue for Analytical Methods and a book on pesticide residue analysis. He is a member of the National Codex Committee for Metrology, the IUPAC committee on Crop Protection and co-founder of the Latin America Pesticide Residues Workshop (LAPRW). He has served as Technical Officer at IAEA headquarters and has been a visiting professor at universities in Brazil, Argentina, and Spain.