Marianne Lepp earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. She was an academic for seven years before being lured into Internet research. She has worked at BBN, Genuity, and Juniper Networks. At these companies she chaired IETF routing working groups, monitored Arpanet and the Internet, prepared coursework on BBN protocols, ran the capacity engineering group for Genuity, did research on OSPF convergence on a live ISP backbone, and was a consulting engineer for Juniper. In between she wrote and edited books for Addison Wesley.

When not exploring her new interest, network security, she occupies herself with yoga, training her dog Simon, skiing, and scuba diving.