[1] Born in Brașov,[2] Cristescu chose her career while examining aquatic habitats in the Danube Delta or exploring trails and caves of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania during her childhood summer vacations.

[1] She was also influenced by the books of Ștefan Negrea, a Romanian biologist and speleologist.

[1] Cristescu earned her BSc Honors in Biology at Ovidius University of Constanța in 1996.

After spending a year in Rochester, New York studying English, she moved to Canada, where she obtained a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at the University of Guelph in 2004, under the direction of Paul D. N.

Her other research areas include the nature and scale of recombination and mutation rate variation across genomes, the genetics of aquatic invasions, and speciation in ancient lakes.