Biography
Laura Clayton is Chief Operating Officer at the University of Reading, leading professional services and driving transformation to enable academic success.
With more than 20 years’ experience in higher education, Laura has delivered major change programmes at UCL, King's College London, the University of Nottingham, and the University of East London, where she established a new directorate for strategy, insight and transformation. Her experience spans service redesign, robotic process automation, and multi-campus strategic alignment, earning her teams at the University of East London a 2025 Change Award for innovation in service delivery.
Laura focuses on practical, homegrown solutions that embed continuous improvement and build collaborative cultures. Her leadership centres on creating conditions for sustainable transformation in resource-constrained environments, alongside a strong commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion as an active mentor, ensuring universities thrive through internally driven innovation.
Laura joined the University in November 2025.
