Laura Connor was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 20, 1958, the oldest daughter of Leonard and Rosemary Jankiewicz. In May of 1976, she graduated, Salutatorian and an Illinois State Scholar, from Mount Assisi Academy High School in Lemont, Illinois. Her achievements also included membership in her High School's National Honor Society. After completing one year of undergraduate work at Moraine Valley Community College, Laura was accepted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She married Charles Connor on May 2, 1980. Together, they graduated from the University of Illinois in May of 1982, with Laura receiving the degree of Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a major in Biology. From Illinois, Laura, Charles, and their son Michael, moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, where Matthew and then Jennifer were born. During the next five years, Laura worked as a lab assistant, in a paleomagnetics lab, for Dr. Noye Johnson, at Dartmouth College, and attended evening computer programming classes. During the summer of 1987, after Charles received his doctorate in Geology from Dartmouth College, they moved to Miami, Florida, where Charles began teaching at Florida International University and where Laura attended classes and worked as a computer programmer for Dr. Brad Clement in the Geology Department. For the next five years Laura collaborated with Charles in creating Geophysical modeling programs for volcanology research and classroom teaching. After surviving the Hurricane Andrew disaster of August, 1992, Laura and Charles moved to San Antonio where Charles had accepted employment at Southwest Research Institute. Laura was accepted to the Master of Science degree program in Computer Science at the University of San Antonio in 1995. During her first semester of graduate study she worked as a teaching assistant. The following semester she became employed by Southwest Research Institute as a programmer. At Southwest Research Institute Laura again collaborated with Charles to develop a real-time visualization tool for geophysical mapping. This collaboration culminated in two papers: Real-Time Geophysics Using Linux, published in Linux Journal, the July, 1999 issue, and Looking Beneath the Earth's Surface, in Technology Today, 1999 Spring issue, published by Southwest Research Institute. During the summer of 1998 Laura began working for the Support Office for Aerogeophysical Research (SOAR), affiliated with UT Austin. SOAR supported her Master's Thesis work at UT San Antonio. Field work for her thesis took Laura to Antarctica and the South Pole during the winter of 1998.