Laurent received the B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, advised by Sanjay Lall and co-advised by Matthew West. After completing his doctoral work, Laurent was an LCCC Postdoc at Lund University, Sweden, where he worked with Anders Rantzer. Subsequently, Laurent was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked in the Berkeley Center for Control and Identification with Andrew Packard and also collaborated with Ben Recht and others in the AMPLab. While at Berkeley, he was also partially supported by Kameshwar Poolla.