Burge completed his Bachelor of Science at Stanford University in 1990, and continued graduate studies in computational biology at Stanford University, gaining his PhD[7] in 1997[4] under the supervision of Samuel Karlin.
[5][6] During his time at Stanford he was responsible for developing algorithms for GENSCAN used in gene prediction for example the initial analysis of the Human Genome Project.
[8] His PhD thesis was titled Identification of genes in human genomic DNA.
[9] Burge joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 as a Bioinformatics Fellow.
[4] His current research interests include genomics, RNA splicing and microRNA[10] regulation.