David Burke received his BSc in Chemistry and Computer Science from Kings College London, followed by an MSc from Birkbeck College, University of London. He received his PhD in Biophysics from the Institute of Cancer Research, Sutton, University of London.

His post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge and at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) focused on the development and application of bioinformatic and computational structural biology algorithms to model the effect of mutations on protein function, structure and their role in disease. He has applied these techniques to a wide variety of human diseases as well as infectious diseases such as the influenza and SARS2 viruses.