Prescod-Weinstein was born in Los Angeles, California, where she grew up in the eastside neighborhood of El Sereno and attended schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is of Barbadian descent on her mother's side and Russian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish descent on her father's side. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and astronomy at Harvard College in 2003. Her thesis, "A study of winds in active galactic nuclei", was completed under the supervision of Martin Elvis. She then earned a master's degree in astronomy in 2005 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Anthony Aguirre. In 2006, Prescod-Weinstein changed research directions and ultimately moved to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to work with Lee Smolin. In 2010, Prescod-Weinstein completed her doctoral dissertation, titled " Cosmic acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology ", under the supervision of Lee Smolin and Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo, while conducting her research at the Perimeter Institute.