Harold Burgess is a Senior Investigator in the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his B.Sc. 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. Dr Burgess joined the NICHD in 2008 where his laboratory studies neural circuits underlying sensory guided behavior.
The natural environment presents a continuous stream of sensory stimuli that animals must quickly evaluate for an appropriate behavioral response. Researchers in Dr. Burgess' laboratory study the functional development of neuronal connections which regulate the transmission of sensory stimuli to central circuits. They combine computational analysis of behavior with classical genetic and cell-based circuit manipulations in larval stage zebrafish. Zebrafish larvae have a tractable nervous system, a repertoire of genetically determined behaviors and the additional advantage of a brain that is structurally similar to that of humans with the likelihood that many neuronal mechanisms are conserved.
