Neil Burgess

FRS FMedSci
Burgess in 2017
Born (1966-07-13) 13 July 1966 (age 57)
Oakington, Cambridgeshire, England
Education
Alma mater
Spouse
Cathryn McDowell
​
(m. 1997)​
Children3
AwardsRoyal Society University Research Fellowship[1]
Scientific career
FieldsNeuroscience[2]
InstitutionsUniversity College London
ThesisNeural networks, human memory and optimisation (1990)
Doctoral advisorMichael Moore[3]
Websitewww.ucl.ac.uk/icn/neilburgess

Neil Burgess FRS FMedSci[1][4] (born 13 July 1966) is a British neuroscientist. He has been a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London since 2004[5] and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow since 2011.[2][6][7][8][9] He has made important contributions to understanding memory and spatial cognition by developing computational models relating behaviour to activity in biological neural networks.[1]

Early life and education

Neil Burgess was born on 13 July 1966 in Oakington, Cambridgeshire, to Alan and Lore Burgess (née Freudenthal). He was educated at three schools in Cambridge: Newnham Croft Primary School, Parkside Community College, and Hills Road Sixth Form College.[9]

Burgess studied mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at University College London, graduating with first-class honours in 1987.[1] He then completed postgraduate study in theoretical physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, supervised by Michael Moore,[3][10] where he began working on models of memory with Graham Hitch.[1] Burgess was awarded a PhD in 1990.[3]

Research and career

Burgess has developed models to explain how networks of neurons allow us to represent, remember and imagine our location within the surrounding environment.[1] These models provide a quantitative understanding of how spatial memory,[11] episodic memory and autobiographical memory[12] 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.[1][13]

Awards and honours

Burgess was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2009 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017[1] having previously held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 1993 to 2001.[9]

Personal life

Burgess married Cathryn Jane McDowell in 1997. They have two sons and one daughter.[9]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Anon (2017). "Professor Neil Burgess FMedSci FRS". London: royalsociety.org. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 11 November 2016. Retrieved 9 March 2016.((cite web)): CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  2. ^ a b Neil Burgess publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  3. ^ a b c Burgess, Neil (1990). Neural networks, human memory and optimisation. manchester.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Manchester. Copac 36585289.
  4. ^ Anon (2009). "Neil Burgess FMedSci". acmedsci.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 19 July 2018. Retrieved 17 August 2017.
  5. ^ Anon (2017). "Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Director: Professor Neil Burgess FMedSci FRS". University College London. Archived from the original on 17 April 2016. Retrieved 17 August 2017.
  6. ^ Anon (2017). "Professor Neil Burgess". University College London. Archived from the original on 10 April 2013.
  7. ^ 57216060199 Neil Burgess publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  8. ^ Neil Burgess publications from Europe PubMed Central
  9. ^ a b c d "Burgess, Prof. Neil". Who's Who. A & C Black. 2022. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U289276. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  10. ^ Burgess, Neil; Shapiro, Jonathan L.; Moore, Michael A. (1991). "Neural network models of list learning". Network: Computation in Neural Systems. 2 (4): 399–422. doi:10.1088/0954-898X_2_4_005. ISSN 0954-898X. Closed access icon
  11. ^ Burgess, Neil; Maguire, Eleanor A; O'Keefe, John (2002). "The Human Hippocampus and Spatial and Episodic Memory". Neuron. 35 (4): 625–641. doi:10.1016/s0896-6273(02)00830-9. PMID 12194864. S2CID 11989085.
  12. ^ Lin, Wen-Jing; Horner, Aidan J.; Burgess, Neil (2016). "Ventromedial prefrontal cortex, adding value to autobiographical memories". Scientific Reports. 6 (1): 28630. Bibcode:2016NatSR...628630L. doi:10.1038/srep28630. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 4919650. PMID 27338616. Open access icon
  13. ^ Hartley, Tom; Lever, Colin; Burgess, Neil; O'Keefe, John (2013). "Space in the brain: how the hippocampal formation supports spatial cognition". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 369 (1635): 20120510. doi:10.1098/rstb.2012.0510. ISSN 0962-8436. PMC 3866435. PMID 24366125. Open access icon


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