As of 2016[update], she is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia University.
Her doctoral dissertation is titled "RNA editing and the evolution of mitochondrial DNA in kinetoplastid protozoa.
In a 2000 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on biocomputers, Landweber solved chess's knights problem, where one determines how many non-attacking knights can be placed on a chessboard, using a test tube of RNA,[4] a breakthrough in DNA computing.
Laura Landweber has also studied the evolution of the genetic code[5] and the scrambled genomes of ciliates such as Oxytricha.
[5] Her studies of the massive rearrangements of the genome in the micronucleus of Oxytricha showed an unsuspected role for non-coding RNA in directing the process epigenetically.