Lise Menn is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Having been part of the Department of Linguistics since 1986, she has served as a professor of linguistics, a faculty fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and Associate Editor of the journal Aphasiology.

In 1976 she received her PhD in Linguistics in from the University of Illinois, Urbana, specializing in the emergence of language in children. After a postdoctoral year in the Speech Communication Laboratory of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, she began to work at the Aphasia Research Center, Boston University School of Medicine. She has also held visiting research appointments in neurolinguistics at UCLA and in Japan. In 1995 she was an associate director of the Linguistic Institute at the University of New Mexico.