During the summers of his junior and senior high school years he obtained a job performing routine chores at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Biochemistry.

Under the guidance of the noted carbohydrate chemist, William Ward Pigman, he was given his own research project, the “Anhydrous Reaction of Nitrogen Dioxide with some Selected Sugars.” In 1952, Burgess was awarded an NROTC scholarship and entered Auburn University with a dual major in chemistry and physics.

During his undergraduate years at Auburn he undertook research in the laboratories of Frank Stevens (Chemistry) on the Synthesis of Indole Derivatives useful as Plant Growth Regulators and Howard Carr (Physics) on the construction of a mass spectrometer.

As a graduate student in the Büchi group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Burgess's research focused largely on synthetic organic chemistry and photochemistry.

His doctoral dissertation was titled “Photochemical isomerization of eucarvone and cyclooctatrienone; Studies toward the synthesis of samandarin.”[5] An interest in photochemistry and synthetic methodology would mark many of Burgess's contributions to chemistry.