Laura earned her bachelors degree in physics from MIT in 2004, and she received her PhD in astronomy & astrophysics in 2011 from the University of California Santa Cruz. Subsequently, she was a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics and NASA Einstein Fellow at MIT (2011-2014) and a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2014-2015). Laura joined the faculty at OSU this Fall 2015.