Laura Henry was born on 15 May 1212 in Palo Alto, California. She lived in Palo Alto until she graduated from high school in 1930. She then earned her BA in Education at State Teachers College of San Jose, California in 1934 before earning her MA in Biology from Stanford University in California in 1935. She worked as a faculty member and dean of girls at Sonora High school for six years before she was commissioned as an officer in the WAVES.

She completed basic training at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts and was intended to become a dean of a WAVES training center due to her experience as a dean at Sonora High School. However, because of her education in biology and experience in mathematics and physics, she was chosen for special training in aerography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she graduated with an MS degree and Meteorology before she became one of the twenty-two aerologists in the WAVES. As an aerologist, she prepared weather forecasts for planes at the Naval Air School at Patuxent River, Maryland. She later worked as an instructor at the United States Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

After her time in the military, she earned her PhD in Biology from Stanford University in 1950. She joined the Association of Southeastern Biologists while teaching at Florida State University in 1951. Then she returned to California in 1952 to continue her research work at Stanford University. She married R. Morris Doyle in 1961 and became a teacher at Menlo Atherton High School until she retired in 1975. She was a member of the California Academy of Science, American Entomology Society, and Audubon Society. Laura Henry traveled extensively all over the world with the science-oriented groups including trips to Iceland and Antarctica while in her late eighties and early nineties until her death on 19 January 2009.