Lisa C. Paul was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, in 1962, and moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, when she was four. She is a 1980 graduate of Appleton West High School. She first traveled to the Soviet Union in 1982 as part of a Soviet Studies semester during her sophomore year in college. A year later, she returned to Moscow to work as a nanny for an American family. She lived there from 1983 to 1985, just before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and ushered in an era of openness and political reforms. Lisa graduated with a major in Russian Area Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1986, and then she moved to Washington, D.C., to work on a landmark conference on U.S.-Soviet relations. After the conference, she worked for the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations, and then decided to pursue a career in law. She returned to her home state of Wisconsin in 1990 to attend Marquette University Law School. Lisa is currently a civil litigation attorney in Milwaukee, where she lives with her husband, Ross Puppe; their two daughters, Catherine, age 12, and Jamie, age six; and their dog Rascal.