Heather Lintz started her career in ecology as an undergraduate on exchange in Ecuador for two years. She attended classes in Ecuador and was employed by a non-profit organization, Jatun Sacha, that conserves large parcels of endemic habitat to facilitate research, education, and conservation. She won grant funding for Jatun Sacha on several projects including the construction of the Guandera Biological Station in the Andes of northern Ecuador. After receiveing her B.S. in Biology from the University of Oregon in 1997, she co-founded the Walama Restoration Project, a non-profit organization in Eugene, Oregon, dedicated to strengthening the tie between environmental education and the restoration of endemic habitats.

She reared Walama to autonomy and enrolled as a Masters student in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University (OSU) in 2005. She finished her M.S. studying wetlands of eastern Oregon under Mary Kentula and Mark Wilson. She is now a Ph.D. student in OSU's Department of Botany and Plant Pathology working with Bruce McCune. She complements her research modeling tree species distributions with a doctoral minor in Statistics. Heather won the 2006 E.C. Pielou Award at the Annual Meeting for the Ecological Society of America based on quality of the work's contribution to statistical ecology. Heather also won the 2007 Augusta Rockafellar Memorial Scholarship sponsored by the Native Plant Society of Oregon and the 2008 Oregon Scholarship Fund Award for Graduate Students from the State of Oregon. onsHeather's hobbies include skiing, and playing the drum set.