Cook comes from a family of mixed Mexican and Italian ancestry, with two sisters. She was born in
Lansing, Michigan, in 1964, near where her father was working towards his doctorate in physics at
Michigan State University; as a child she moved to
Baltimore, Maryland (where her father worked at the
National Bureau of Standards) and then Colorado. Her father encouraged Cook and her sisters to work with computers growing up; they all ended up with
electrical engineering degrees. Cook became an undergraduate at the
University of Colorado Colorado Springs. While a student, she
lost the use of her lower limbs through
severing her spinal cord in an automobile accident. She finished her bachelor's degree in 1987, and worked from 1987 to 1993 as an electrical engineer for
McDonnell Douglas. Returning to graduate study, she receiving a master's degree in 1996 at the
University of Colorado Boulder. She continued her graduate studies at
New Mexico State University after ruling out many other universities whose campuses were not accessible to wheelchairs. She completed her doctorate in electrical engineering there in 2002, with the dissertation
Reducing processor simulation time by using adaptive, non-uniform model complexity, jointly supervised by Eric Johnson and Richard Oliver. After finishing her doctorate, she remained at New Mexico State University as a faculty member until 2012, when she moved to the Sandia National Laboratories. ==Recognition==