Campbell was born in Barbados. Her father, Merville O'Neale Campbell, was a mathematician at the
University of the West Indies and was the first person from Barbados to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Her mother, a teacher, was from Ghana, where her father had taught prior to his 1964 return to Barbados. In 1967, the family moved to another campus of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where Campbell grew up. She writes that she always wanted to become an educator, aiming more specifically for mathematics after finding it to be her best subject already as a preschooler. Campbell did her undergraduate studies in mathematics at the
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, graduating with first class honours. After additional study at the
University of Cambridge, she moved to
McGill University in Canada, where she worked with Sherwin Maslowe. She earned a master's degree at McGill in 1996, with a master's thesis on
Forced Rossby Wave Packets in a Zonal Shear Flow in the Presence of Critical Layers. In 2000 she completed her Ph.D. there. Her dissertation was
Nonlinear Critical Layer Development of Forced Wave Packets in Geophysical Shear Flows. ==Later career==