Hagai Bergman started medical school at the Technion, Haifa in 1973. He completed his M.Sc. thesis in Neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980 and earned his M.D. and D.Sc. from the Technion, Haifa, Israel in 1984. During his post-doctorate fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1984-1987 under Moshe Abeles) and at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, USA (1987-1990 under Mahlon DeLong) he learned to conduct multiple electrode recordings in the frontal cortex of behaving primates and to conduct physiological recording in the basal ganglia in normal and parkinsonian conditions.

In 1990, he started his own research group in the Department of Physiology of the Hebrew University – Hadassah Medical School. His research team is investigating the computational physiology of the basal ganglia and their disorders (e.g., Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia) in non-human primates and human patients undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) procedures.