[2][3][4] LaPaugh is originally from Middletown, Connecticut,[2] where her father worked in an office and her mother was a librarian; she majored in physics at Cornell University.
[3] This was at a time when Cornell had no undergraduate computer science program, but she became interested in computer science through courses on mathematical logic and formal languages, with instructors including Anil Nerode, Juris Hartmanis, and John Hopcroft.
She began her doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, working with Ron Rivest on graph algorithms, and finished her Ph.D. there in 1980[2] with the dissertation Algorithms for Integrated Circuit Layout: An Analytic Approach.
[5] LaPaugh worked for a year as a visiting assistant professor at Brown University before joining the Princeton University faculty as an assistant professor in 1981,[1][2][3][4] at first as the only female engineering faculty member[2] and, after earning tenure in 1987,[4] as the only tenured woman in engineering.
[2] She was promoted to full professor in 1995,[1] and was the master of Forbes College at Princeton from 2000 to 2004.