Burcu received her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst studying forebrain patterning in zebrafish. She completed her postdoctoral training in the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard Medical School, before becoming a research scientist in the Synthetic Neurobiology group at MIT. Her postdoctoral work focused on dissecting the genetic mechanisms underlying heart and vascular development using zebrafish as a model system. While in the Synthetic Neurobiology group, Burcu led efforts to map zebrafish brain circuitry, as well as on building collaborative efforts for finding new biological and biomedical tools from nature.