Neil Burgess

Neil Burgess (born 1966) FRS FMedSci is a Professor of Cognitive neuroscience at University College London and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. He has made important contributions to understanding memory and spatial cognition by developing computational models relating behaviour to activity in biological neural networks.

Burgess was educated at University College London (UCL), where he was an undergraduate student of Mathematics and Physics. He completed his postgraduate study in theoretical physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester supervised by Michael A. Moore, where he began working on models of memory with Graham Hitch and was awarded a PhD in 1990.

Burgess research in neuroscience has developed models to explain how networks of neurons allow us to represent, remember and imagine our location within the surrounding environment. These models provide a quantitative understanding of how spatial memory, episodic memory and autobiographical memory function (and dysfunction) depend on human brain activity. With Tom Hartley at the University of York and Colin Lever at Durham University he both predicted and discovered neurons representing environmental boundaries.

Awards and honours

Burgess was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2009 having previously held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.