Stoica was born in Romania, where he grew up and attended Polytechnic University of Bucharest, receiving a MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1989. He moved to the USA in 1994 to start a PhD at Old Dominion University with computer-science professor Hussein Abdel-Wahab. In 1996, he transferred to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where in 2000 he received a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering supervised by Hui Zhang.
