Laura Waller earned her B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. She was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University, USA before joining the UC Berkeley where she is currently the Ted Van Duzer Endowed Associate Professor.

Waller has established herself as a visionary in the important new field of computational imaging through her pioneering work on phase retrieval from intensity measurements. She has also made advancements in Fourier ptychography, 3D imaging in scattering media and in imaging using a diffuser. In the past four years, Waller has generated ~$6M in research funding and published 27 journal papers and 6 patent applications. Her research has been recognized through over 100 invited talks, and she has contributed to the research community by serving on 44 conference committees (14 as chair) and as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging.

She has received many other awards, including the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative Biohub Investigator Award, and the OSA Foundation’s Ivan P. Kaminow Outstanding Early Career Professional Prize. She is a Fellow of OSA and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. In 2021, she received OSA's Adolph Lomb Medal "for important contributions to the advancement of computational microscopy and its applications."