Laura Clayton is Chief Operating Officer at the University of Reading, leading professional services and driving transformation to enable academic success.
With over 20 years in higher education, Laura has delivered major change programmes across UCL, King’s College London, the University of Nottingham, and the University of East London, where she established a new directorate for strategy, insight and transformation.
Her experience spans service redesign, robotic process automation, and multi-campus strategic alignment. Under her leadership, her teams won two Change Awards in 2025, notably for innovation in service delivery. Laura focuses on practical, homegrown solutions that embed continuous improvement and build collaborative cultures.
Her leadership centres on creating conditions for sustainable transformation in resource-constrained environments, alongside a strong commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion as an active mentor, ensuring universities thrive through internally-driven innovation.
