Burke attended Imperial College London, where she did her PhD research on stress corrosion cracking (SCC).
Working under the supervision of P. R. Swann and F. J. Humphreys, Burke studied the mechanism of SCC of austenitic stainless steel.
[1] After earning her doctorate, Burke returned to the United States, where she worked at the U.S. Steel Research Laboratory in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.
She also performed correlative TEM analyses in combination with atom probe field ion microscopy (APFIM).
She joined the Westinghouse Science and Technology Center, where she studied a broad range materials and alloys for nuclear power systems.