Virginia Burger, Ph.D.

Virginia Burger, co-founder and CEO of New Equilibrium Biosciences, is passionate about combining computational and experimental approaches to create new and better medicines. Virginia completed a Ph.D. through a joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh program in Computational Biology, where she developed network models for interpreting biological processes and patented a computer vision algorithm that was used by a university spinout for cancer prognosis. As an NSF and Swiss NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, she focused her research on a class of undrugged proteins, termed intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), and performed both biophysical and computational experiments to discover druggable conformations of IDPs. She also supervised a team that created publicly available tools for interpreting experimental data on IDPs. In addition to her research, Virginia served as the Community Building Chair for MIT’s Postdoctoral Association and participated in MIT’s Translational Fellows Program, where she began customer discovery for the company that is now New Equilibrium. Virginia then worked for two years at XtalPi, Inc., an algorithm-driven pharmaceutical technology startup. As a Senior Scientist and the Director of Scientific Collaborations, she was the lead scientific contact for establishing pharmaceutical partnerships during XtalPi’s period of rapid growth. In August 2019, Virginia started New Equilibrium with the goal of designing drugs that would target IDPs and cure disease.