Born in 1887 in Newport, Rhode Island, Robert Burgess graduated from Brown University. He was a Rhodes scholar from 1908 to 1911 and received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1914. He taught mathematics at Purdue, Cornell and Brown Universities.

During World War I, Burgess served in the Army, advancing to the rank of major; he also served in the statistics branch of the Army General Staff in Washington. He was a statistician and economist with the Western Electric Company from 1924 to 1952. He became director of the Census Bureau in 1953, overseeing the 1960 census during his tenure. He died in 1969.