Laura received her B.A. in Biochemistry and Biological Basis of Behavior from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. She then went on to complete a PhD with Paul Taghert at Washington University in St. Louis studying the neuropeptide regulation of circadian behavior in Drosophila. She conducted postdoctoral research with Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University where she switched her studies to the Aedes aegypti mosquito. She started her own lab at Columbia University in 2019 where she is a member of the Department of Biological Sciences and an affiliate of the Zuckerman Institute. Her research focuses on understanding the biological basis of host-seeking and mating behaviors in mosquitoes. She is the recipient of a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in Neuroscience, and she is Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences.