[4] Daston was born in 1951 in East Lansing, Michigan,[5] to parents of Greek heritage, who named her for the muse Urania.

[5] Daston earned a PhD from Harvard University in the history of science under the direction of I. Bernard Cohen[6] and Erwin N. Hiebert,[7] with the thesis The Reasonable Calculus: Classical Probability Theory 1650-1840.

[1] Daston began her professorial career as an assistant professor at Harvard University (1980–1983),[5] during which time she participated in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld program "The Probabilistic Revolution" organized by Lorenz Krüger, Ian Hacking, and Nancy Cartwright 1982–1983.

[8] There she met her husband-to-be Gerd Gigerenzer and began a complex series of professional moves to handle their academic two-body problem.

[2] In 2002, she delivered two Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, in which she traced theoretical conceptions of nature in several literary and philosophical works.