Zurk majored in computer science at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating in 1985. After working in industry, she returned to school for a 1991 master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from
Northeastern University. She completed a Ph.D. in 1995 at the
University of Washington; her dissertation concerned the
remote sensing of snow via
electromagnetic scattering. In 1996, she joined the technical staff of the
Lincoln Laboratory in Boston, where her work was split between acoustics and
radar. In the 2000–2001 academic year, she traveled to Finland as a
Fulbright Scholar. She moved to the Portland State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2005, where she founded the Northwest Electromagnetics and Acoustics Research Laboratory (NEAR-Lab). She became a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2016. In 2017 she became executive director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington. ==Recognition==