Christine M. Anderson-Cook was born in Manhattan, Kansas in March 1966 before moving to Waterloo, Ontario, Canada where she grew up and lived until her 20s. She received a Bachelor of Mathematics in Statistics and Teaching from the University of Waterloo and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Western Ontario, both in 1989. She then earned a Master's of Science in Statistics from the University of Toronto in 1990, before returning to the University of Waterloo to earn a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1994. She married G. Stan Cook, a mathematics teacher and her former teaching mentor, in 1995.