He then became a research assistant at the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, which was chaired by Rainer Voigt.
He obtained his doctorate in Semitic Studies at the Free University of Berlin in 2003, with his dissertation supervised by Rainer Maria Voigt [de] and Kurt Rudolph.
[4] After graduation, in 2004, Burtea became a research assistant at the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt, where he worked on the research project "The Influence of Globalization and Regionalization Processes in the History of the Eastern Church on the Emergence, Spread and Early Development of Islam in the 6th and 7th Centuries".
[4] From 2004 to 2011, he was a research assistant at the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin, where he worked on several Mandaic textual translation projects funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
In 2017, he was a visiting scholar in the BabMed (Babylonian Medicine) research project at the Free University of Berlin.