Laurent Heirendt was born in 1987 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg (Europe). He received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2009. A year later, he received his MSc in Advanced Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London in the UK, where his research and thesis focused on developing a general dynamic model for shimmy analysis of aircraft landing gear that is still in use today. He received his PhD in 2014 in Aerospace Science from the University of Toronto, Canada. He developed a thermo-tribomechanical model of an aircraft landing gear, which led to a patent pending design of a critical aircraft landing gear component. He then worked in industry and oversaw the structural analysis of large aircraft docking structures.

Laurent currently works as a Research Associate at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine. His work focuses on responsible and reproducible research science and scientific computing applications using Julia. Besides his mother tongue Luxembourgish, he is fluent in English, French and German, and he is actively learning Brazilian Portuguese.