Biography
During PhD and a junior faculty position at Monash U (1975-1981), then later at the U of NSW (1981-1999), Burnham rode the exciting new wave of infant visual perception research in the 70s and then was one of the first 80s Australian punks to jump onto the equally, if not more, exciting wave of infant speech perception.

From the mid-80s he embraced cross-disciplinary research with experimental phoneticians and speech scientists, and in the late 80s added research across those mini-laboratories, called languages, that so conveniently provide systematic variation of the auditory input.

After his appointment as Foundation Director of MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney U in 1999, his research focus continued to develop and expand in: infant speech perception; auditory-visual speech perception; captions for the hearing impaired; tone languages – lexical tone perception, tone perception with cochlear implants, and speech-music interactions; human-machine interaction; speech corpus studies; the role of infants' perceptual experience and expertise in literacy development; and special speech registers, including infant-, pet-, foreigner-, computer-, and lover-directed speech.

So too have his collaborations developed and expanded – with phoneticians, linguists, engineers, clinicians, computer scientists, music cognition researchers, creative artists, and neuroscientists, with the result of many emergent issues, paradigms, findings, and friendships. He is currently Visiting Professor in Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at Nanyang Technological U, forging further collaborations.