He received his B.Sc. (Computer Science) from the National University of Singapore in 1985. He received his M.Sc. (Computer Science), M. Arts (Mathematics) and Ph.D. (Computer Science) all from Indiana University in 1987, 1988 and 1992 respectively.
He joined NUS-JHU Center for Information-enhanced Medicine at NUS in 1992 as a Research Associate. He then joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK as an Assistant Professor in 1995 and became a Full Professor in 2002. He has formerly served as Department Chairman and as Head of Graduate Division. He has served as the Director of CUHK Virtual Reality, Visualization, and Imaging Research Centre since 1999 and the Director of Centre for Cognition and Interaction Technology at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2006.
Heng’s research interests include AI/XR for medical applications, surgical simulation, visualization, computer graphics, and human-computer interaction. He has published over 550 publications in these areas with 32000+ Google citations. He has graduated over 50 Ph.D. students, many of them have taken positions at leading universities or research labs in Hong Kong and Mainland China.