Dr. Laura G. Anderton (1918-2011) of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, served in the United States Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) from July 1943 until July 1946 and was a faculty member of the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) from 1948 to 1986.

Dr. Laura G. Anderton was born in 1918 in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She studied biology and graduated from Wellesley College in 1940, then did additional work at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She taught and was named acting dean at Howard Seminary preparatory school in Massachusetts before entering the military.

Anderton joined the WAVES in July 1943. She attended Officer Candidate School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then as a company commander at the WAVES Hospital Corps School in Bethesda, Maryland, from the summer of 1943 until 1945. Anderton was then transferred to the WAVES Hospital Corps School at the National Naval Medical Center, also in Bethesda, as a battalion commander. Her next duty was regimental commander at the naval barracks in Washington, D.C. She was discharged in July 1946.

From 1946 to 1948, Anderton attended graduate school at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on the GI Bill. She then taught biology at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, renamed the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1963, from which she retired in 1986 at the age of sixty-eight.

Anderton was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Danforth Fellowship, which were used to complete her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Anderton died in Raleigh, North Carolina on 19 February, 2011.