Doina Precup is a Romanian researcher currently living in Montreal, Canada, who specializes in artificial intelligence (AI). She is the associate dean of research at the Faculty of Science at McGill University, holds a Canada Research Chair in machine learning, and is a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Precup also heads the Montreal office of Google DeepMind. She was educated at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, completing her thesis titled "Temporal Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning" under Richard S. Sutton in 2000.

Precup stated that she was drawn to the field of artificial intelligence at an early age due to her interest in science fiction, where robots are frequently depicted as benevolent and useful. Her mother worked as a university professor of computer science in Romania. In 1994, Precup earned a bachelor of science degree in computer science and engineering (magna cum laude) from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, followed by a master of science degree in 1995. She left Romania in 1995 on a Fulbright scholarship to undertake graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, earning a master's degree in 1997 and a PhD in 2000.

Several women in Precup's family had successful careers in science, and her high school science program in Romania had strong female attendance. She only became aware of the gender imbalance in science and technology after relocating to North America. To help address this issue, she became involved as a co-founder and advisor of the AI4Good Lab, an organization dedicated to encouraging more women to study and work in artificial intelligence.

Precup was recruited as an assistant professor by McGill University's School of Computer Science in 2000 and has since been living in the Montreal area. In 2017, Precup was appointed to lead the Montreal office of the artificial intelligence firm Deepmind, which is owned by Google. She teaches at McGill while conducting fundamental research on reinforcement learning at Deepmind, working in particular on AI applications in areas that have a social impact, such as health care (medical imaging for example). She is interested in machine decision-making in situations where uncertainty is high.

She is a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. With four other AI researchers (Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Rich Sutton and Ian Kerr), she sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister in 2017 asking him to start addressing the risks posed by the development of AI-controlled weapons.