[2] Dajani was born in Lebanon,[3] and did her undergraduate studies at the American University of Beirut,[4] initially in medicine but switching after a year to mathematics.
[3] Because of the Lebanese Civil War, she and her family moved to the US,[3] where she earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from George Washington University.
[3] Her dissertation, Simultaneous Recurrence of Weighted Cocycles, was supervised by E. Arthur Robinson Jr.,[5] after a previous advisor, Daniel Ullman, shifted his own interests away from ergodic theory.
[1] With her husband Cor Kraaikamp, Dajani is the author of the book Ergodic Theory of Numbers, published in 2002 by the Mathematical Association of America as volume 29 of their Carus Mathematical Monographs.
[7] The book grew out of a course given by Dajani in a 1996 summer program for women in mathematics.