Kurt was born in Col­orado and moved to Idaho at the age of nine. Kurt grew up in the out­doors and trav­eled exten­sively around the world, vis­it­ing var­i­ous con­ser­va­tion and research projects through­out the third world with his father (for­mer pres­i­dent of The Pere­grine Fund, Dr. William Burn­ham). Kurt first vis­ited Green­land in 1991 and received his Bachelor’s degree in Biol­ogy from the Col­lege of Idaho in 1997. Upon grad­u­at­ing Kurt began work­ing for The Pere­grine Fund man­ag­ing their Green­land Project, and in 2003 was appointed as their Arc­tic Projects Direc­tor. In the fall of 2006 Kurt cre­ated the High Arc­tic Insti­tute and in the spring of 2008 received his D.Phil. from the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, with his the­sis research focus­ing on Pere­grine and Gyr­fal­con pop­u­la­tions in Green­land. Kurt has con­ducted field research in Green­land every sum­mer since 1991, spend­ing nearly three com­bined years of his life in Greenland.