Laura was born in Córdoba, Argentina. She did her undergraduate degree at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. She then obtained a PhD in 2002 from the University of California at Berkeley, under the supervision of Bernd Sturmfels. After postdoctoral appointments at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Harvard University, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania for a tenure-track position. She and her husband were able to finally solve their three-year, bicoastal two-body problem at Texas A&M University, where they have been since 2005. She has held an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Most recently she was honored to deliver an invited address at the AMS Spring Sectional Meeting in 2016.

Laura studies hypergeometric functions and differential equations using analytic, algebraic and combinatorial tools. Since hypergeometric systems depend on parameters, a major goal is to understand the effect of parameter variation on the solutions of such systems. It turns out that generic parameters usually present a uniform behavior, and thus her main contributions have focused on understanding what happens at special parameters. Along the way, she has developed a strong interest in combinatorial commutative algebra, especially the combinatorics of binomial primary decomposition.