Laura has co-directed and taught in ICLAD's Residence Program, developing the course "Legislative and Social Scientific Research Methods." She directs the Summer Internship Program for law students and graduate students, and she has served as Editor-at-Large for the Distance Course on Legislative Drafting for Democratic Social Change. She has consulted with legislation drafters and civil society representatives in more than 20 countries as they conduct research, formulate policy, and draft legislation.

Laura frequently teaches internationally and presents at conferences, programs, and workshops for legislators and government officials and staff. She has recently spoken on evidence-based law drafting techniques and policy development at the first annual United Nations Conference of Ministers Responsible for Civil Registration in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the assembled Ministers adopted a resolution to employ evidence-based drafting techniques in their development of law governing civil registration. She has also worked extensively with the USAID-sponsored Parliamentary Development Program II in Kyiv, Ukraine, and served as an instructor in the United Nations Development Programme-sponsored legislative strengthening program in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. She designs curricula on research methods employing the legislative problem-solving theory and on substantive topics, collaborates with specialists and country partners to generate articles and applied resources on a variety of issues of concern, and works with the Executive Director to develop in-country develop programs and projects.

Laura previously participated in National Science Foundation-sponsored research at the Policy Research Institute regarding official-citizen interaction, worked with the Center for Russian and East European Politics on comparative elections research, and served as director at an education nonprofit. She has examined citizen participation in urban politics with Tufts Prof. Jeff Berry, and the effects of social networks on political behavior with Prof. Cheng-shan Liu of National Sun Yat-sen University's Institute of Political Science. She has taught political science at Boston University and lectured extensively on research methods. Her own research concerns institutional effects on political behavior, especially the comparative effects of legislation drafting institutions and citizen participation mechanisms on participation and governance outcomes. She frequently presents conference papers on these issues.

She received her M.A. in political science from the University of Kansas, studied in the EITM Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, and conducted her doctoral research at Boston University.