Burlak participated regularly in the Russian intellectual quiz show, What? Where? When? from 1995 to 2006 as a part of Ilya Itkin’s team.
Burlak graduated from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the faculty of philology at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1991, and obtained her PhD in 1995. Her major works include articles and books on comparative linguistics and on Tocharistics, and research on the genesis of human language. Since 1996 she has given lectures at MSU on comparative linguistics. Burlak has authored approximately 20 articles and books, including Historical phonology of the Tocharian languages and the manual Comparative linguistics (jointly with Sergei Starostin).[1][2]