Deera was born on Minos 5, a primarily research outpost for the Trill Science Ministry. Her parents were owners of a large mining consortium that had come to Minos 5 to help with the excavation of the ruins they found there. Not to mention that by helping they got rights to mine minerals from the planet itself after the scholars had given the all clear.

Unlike her brothers, Deera always found herself more interested in spending time with the scientists than learning the family trade.  She met and was mentored for a time by Dr Yakov Ren, host to the Ren symbiont and former star fleet officer turned scientist. She spent hours talking and learning from him, setting her sights on two-fold goal: first, she was going to become a host one day, and second, she would join Starfleet.

She studied hard and after some time she was able to take the test as an initiate and passed with full marks. When it was being decided which symbiont she would receive, Yakov Ren put in a special request for her to have the Ren symbiont when he passed away. With that request came a letter of recommendation to the Academy and request that she start immediately. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, she quickly went and was accepted into Starfleet Academy.

While at the academy, she excelled at most subjects and was finding the first year rather easy. That was until she was given Professor McLandon, an insufferable human of Scottish decent. The man challenged everything that Deera said, since coming into the Academy with two doctorates already under her belt made Deera rather sure of herself.  Professor McLandon seemed to love knocking everything she knew to be true down a peg and making her prove the most simple of facts.

It wasn't until in her later years at the Academy that she realized just how valuable that was, because now she understood why she stood by those facts rather than just blindly doing so because it was an accepted fact she had reasoned through it herself.