[1][2] Precup said she was drawn to the field of artificial intelligence at a young age by her interest in science fiction, where robots are often portrayed as useful and benevolent.

She left Romania in 1995 on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned a master's degree in 1997 and a PhD in 2000.

[3][5] She decided to get involved in correcting this situation and does so as the co-founder and advisor of the AI4Good Lab, an organization that aims at getting more women to study and work in artificial intelligence.

She teaches at McGill while conducting fundamental research on reinforcement learning at Deepmind, working in particular on AI applications in areas that have a social impact, such as health care (medical imaging for example).

[9] With four other AI researchers (Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Rich Sutton and Ian Kerr), she sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister in 2017 asking him to start addressing the risks posed by the development of AI-controlled weapons.