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Dr. Laura McCauley was born in Duluth, Minnesota, however, she called Auburn, Alabama her home for over a decade.  She attended Huntingdon College, in Montgomery, Alabama where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics with secondary teacher certification. With an abundance of education background and a degree in Mathematics, she began Graduate school at Auburn University.

Dr. McCauley has been teaching in college classrooms since 2002, when she began her Master’s degree. After receiving her Master of Applied Mathematics from Auburn University, she attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. At UFL, Laura received a teaching award for her involvement with Upward Bound. Also while attending UFL, her first paper, a collaboration with Dr. Chris Rodger, was published, “Hamiltonian Decompositions of Multi-Partite Graphs with Specified Leaves.”

Dr. McCauley returned to Auburn University to finish her PhD. While there, she received numerous teaching awards, including the College of Science and Mathematics Outstanding Teaching Award.

Laura returned to Huntingdon College as a Visiting professor for a year. She then taught at Columbus State University, in Columbus, Georgia. Dr. McCauley joined us at Peru State College in the Fall of 2013.

McCauley and her husband, Jason Porterfield, have welcomed four boys into their lives: Quinlan (2008), Keegan (2014), Declan (2017), and baby Rowan (Christmas Eve 2018). Laura says all her boys keep her young and are her greatest achievements to date!

 My interests lie in mathematics education and Combinatorics. Combinatorics is a wonderful field of Discrete Mathematics that includes such topics as coding theory and cryptography, as well as design theory and graph theory. Graph Theory is my main love, graph decompositions in particular.