She presently holds a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematical Biology and Medicine at the University of Waterloo.

[1] Layton was born in Hong Kong, where her father was a secondary school mathematics teacher.

[2][1] Her dissertation, High-Order Spatial Discretization Methods for the Shallow Water Equations, concerned numerical weather prediction, and was jointly supervised by Kenneth R. Jackson and Christina C.

In 2018, Layton was awarded the Canada 150 Research Chair,[4][5] and then joined the University of Waterloo, Department of Applied Mathematics.

[7], a 2021 winner of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada by the Women’s Executive Network, a 2022 Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics, a 2022 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the 2023 winner of the Award of Merit by the Federation of Chinese Canadian Professionals, and the 2023 winner of the John L. Synge Award by the Royal Society of Canada.