[4] Born in 1958, Burchat grew up in Barry's Bay, Ontario, Canada, and attended Madawaska Valley District High School.

[6] Burchat held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1986 to 1988, after which she joined the faculty until 1995.

In these experiments she researched Z bosons as the carriers of the weak interaction, heavy neutral leptons, semileptonic decay of charm mesons, charm mixing, CP violations in B meson decays, and differences in the way matter and antimatter evolved in time.

She joined the international community developing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, aiming to study gravitational bending of light by dark matter and the evolution of dark energy.

[9] Her 2008 TED talk, "Shedding light on dark matter", explores these two components making up about 96 percent of the universe.