Laura Harris is an award-winning educator, computational researcher, and instructional designer with over two decades of experience teaching and mentoring learners across secondary, undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and workforce-ready contexts. She has designed and delivered applied training programs reaching thousands of learners and led project-based instruction in data science, biology, and biomedical informatics.

Her work focuses on bridging the gap between academic training and real-world execution, which is a gap she has seen repeatedly leave capable learners feeling unprepared to work independently. Laura is motivated by helping learners translate what they know into defensible, professional-quality work. She is the author of the forthcoming Wiley textbook Bioinformatics for Microbiologists and regularly mentors learners through computational research projects that result in portfolio artifacts, conference presentations, and publications.