Her teaching and research focuses on the impact of trauma on couple relationships and the process of couple therapy with survivors of trauma. She is the recipient of McGill's H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching as well as a number of awards and grants in the area of trauma, interpersonal relationships, and psychotherapy research.

Heather's research began through working with sexual abuse survivors using traditional models of couple therapy. Over the course of this research it became clear that many survivors found these approaches to be challenging as a result of the high levels of emotion that were evoked through the process of therapy. For survivors, this can create challenges with tolerating their emotional experience in the therapy and managing to be fully engaged. At times, survivors found that the emotional process of couple therapy was overwhelming and could lead to them being unable to manage their emotions without shutting down or being overwhelmed and, this could mean that the therapy would have to stop for a while or that their partner felt left out, misunderstood or bad about the impact that the process was having on their partner and the relationship. Through this research, and other work with survivors on the challenges they faced in their relationships and therapy experiences, Heather developed a model of couple therapy that specifically addresses the challenges that survivors of trauma may experience in their relationships and in therapy, Developmental Couple Therapy for Complex Trauma. This model starts with helping the couple learn to understand more about how trauma impacts themselves and their relationship, builds up skills for helping the couple navigate their relationship and the therapy, and then moves on to more active work of processing trauma, helping heal the couple's sexual relationship, and directly address how the trauma may be living in the couple's relationship in the present. Couples who have participated in research on this new model have said that they feel safe, understood, and that they have been able to make progress in both their relationship and their own healing from trauma.

Heather lives on a small farm in Eastern Ontario with her partner and a menagerie of small and large creatures. Sophie the 17 year old cornish rex cat is the only one that makes the cut to live in the house. Outside live two Icelandic horses, Trissa and Hnaggur, Faith the rescue pony, and 13 barn cat refugees relocated from the inner cities of Montreal, Cornwall and Ottawa. Heather's first career was in music. She is a singer and choral director who has also done research on the experience of trauma survivors singing in a choir. She continues to sing in a number of choral groups and an all female quintet, Nothing But Treble. These passions keep her well and revitalized to continue her work with survivors of severe trauma.