Inger Margrethe Mees read English language and literature at the University of Leiden, where she obtained her master’s degree (cum laude) in 1977. In 1974-75, she spent a year at Edinburgh University attending courses on phonetics. In 1983, she was awarded a doctorate from Leiden for a longitudinal socio-phonetic study of the pronunciation of schoolchildren in Cardiff. From 1977-84 she was lecturer at Leiden University. In 1985 she was appointed Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, specialising in the teaching of phonetics and pronunciation training. From 1999-2000 she held the Giese Lectureship at the University of Copenhagen. She has written on contrastive phonetics and pronunciation training for Danish and Dutch students and has also published in the fields of sociolinguistics, historiography of phonetics, English-medium instruction, and translation processes.