Hannah Monyer was born in Romania and went to Germany at the age of 17. She finished high-school in Heidelberg and studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg.

After five years of training in child psychiatry and pediatric neurology in Mannheim and Lübeck, she went to Stanford/USA as a postdoctoral fellow with Dennis Choi. Subsequently she did a second postdoc with Peter Seeburg at the University of Heidelberg, and was then a junior group leader at the same university. 

Since 1999 she is Head of the Department of Clinical Neurobiology at the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University and since 2009 also professor at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) of the Helmholtz Association. In her research on synaptic plasticity, learning and memory she has used a large array of techniques employing molecular biology, electrophysiology, optogenetics and behavioral approaches.

For her achievements she has obtained numerous prizes, including the most prestigious German award for scientists, the Leibniz Prize, the Guy-Lussac-Humboldt Prize, the Tsungming Tu Prize of the Ministry of Science and Technology Taiwan, the Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Lautenschläger Research Prize of the Heidelberg University. She is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, of EMBO, of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the Academia Europaea.