Laura Otis is an American historian of science, and Professor of English, at Emory University. She graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in 1983, and from the University of California, San Francisco with an M.A. in Neuroscience in 1988, and from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1991. She is a guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.