Laura was an IBM Fellow and Director of IBM Research’s Accelerated Discovery Lab. She was Director of Computer Science at IBM’s Almaden Research Center from 2005 to 2011, and had worldwide responsibility for IBM Research’s exploratory science program from 2009 through 2013. From 2001-2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM’s Software Group. Previously, she was a research staff member and manager at Almaden. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Innovation and Technical Achievement, an IBM Corporate Award for information integration technology, the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award, and the ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovation Award. She was Vice President of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004-2009, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice Chair of the board of the Computing Research Association.