LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne is an anthropologist and linguist at the University of Nevada at Reno, where she is an emerita associate professor.
[1] She received her PhD at MIT in 1978, where she studied with linguist Ken Hale.
[2] Together with MIT her classmate Navajo Paul R. Platero, Jeanne is one of the first two Native Americans to have received a PhD degree in linguistics.
Her 1978 thesis (supervised by Hale) was entitled Aspects of Hopi Grammar.
[4] She also co-authored a heavily cited article in Language with Hale, Michael Krauss, Colette Craig, and others on the state of endangered languages.