[1] Rebecca Cann was born in 1951 and spent her childhood at Des Moines, Iowa, where she completed her elementary schooling.
[2] She continued at University of California, Berkeley for her doctorate in genetics under the supervision of Allan Wilson of the Department of Biochemistry, and graduated in 1982.
[1] She got a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
From late 1970s she had collected mtDNA samples from women of different ethnic backgrounds, such as from Asia, South Pacific, Europe and Americans of African descent.
Following her research, a junior graduate student Mark Stoneking added samples from aboriginal Australians and New Guineans.