Dr. Burge's research interests lie in the field of distributed computing. The primary thrust of his current research is in global resource management in large-scale distributed systems. In particular, he is interested in middleware technology to support scalable infrastructures for pervasive environments capable of servicing a very large number of small (possibly mobile) distributed and embedded devices efficiently. He is also interested in the application of distributed high performance computing to solve computational science problems in Biology, Physics, and Chemisty. Dr. Burge is currently the director of the Distributed Systems Research Group (DSRG) and associate director of the Center for Applied High Performance Computing at Howard University. Dr. Burge is also interested in Computer Science Education and Diversity, and Technology Transfer.

Prior to coming to Howard University Dr. Burge worked for the National Security Agency as a Computer Analyst for 5 years, and as a computer consultant for several years. Dr. Burge's previous research includes consistency management in distributed databases, and message passing libraries for distributed parallel computing. The work on consistency management is aimed at developing lightweight protocols that communicate using epidemic algorithms. The distributed parallel computing work consisted of the design and development of an actor-based message passing and thread migration package for Java. The package was used to design a campus wide non-dedicated meta-computer that distributed, and performed load balancing of computations based on CPU cycle stealing.