Harold Burgess is a senior investigator in the Intramural Research Program of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Melbourne, Australia, his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and performed postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania.

Burgess studies the functional development of neuronal connections that regulate the central transmission of sensory stimuli, combining computational analysis of behavior with classical genetic and cell-based circuit manipulations in zebrafish.