Hugh Burkhardt has been at the Shell Centre for Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham since 1976, as Director until 1992. Since then he has led a series of international projects including, in the US, Balanced Assessment, MARS, and its development of a Toolkit for Change Agents. He is the Project Director of MARS with particular responsibility for project processes and progress and a Visiting Professor at Michigan State University.

He takes an 'engineering' view of educational research and development - that it is about systematic design and development to make a complex system work better, with theory as a guide and empirical evidence the ultimate arbiter.

His core interest is in the dynamics of curriculum change. He sees assessment as one important 'tool for change' among the many that are needed to help achieve some resemblance between goals of policy and outcomes in practice. His other interests include making mathematics more functional for everyone through teaching real problem solving and mathematical modeling, computer-aided math education, software interface design and human-computer interaction.

He also remains occasionally active in elementary particle physics (He graduated from Oxford University and the University of Birmingham where, alongside research in theoretical physics and undergraduate teaching, he first developed his work on teaching the uses of mathematics to help solve everyday life problems).