She is married to Gregory Petsko, who was director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center and chair of biochemistry at Brandeis University prior to moving to Weill Cornell Medicine, where he became director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer's Disease Research Institute. Glimcher was previously married to Hugh Auchincloss, who was a chief of Transplant Surgery at Brigham & Women's Hospital, with whom she had three children, Kalah, Hugh and Jake Auchincloss. Her daughter, Kalah Auchincloss, J.D., M.P.H., is a senior vice president of regulatory compliance and deputy general counsel for Greenleaf Health and previously was deputy chief of staff for two Food and Drug Administration commissioners. Her eldest son, Dr. Hugh Glimcher Auchincloss, is also a physician, who was in training as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016. Her younger son, Jake Auchincloss, is a cybersecurity professional and a Newton, Massachusetts City Counselor-at-large following service as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. Laurie Glimcher has been considered a champion of women's rights in the scientific by many of her peers. While she was at Harvard, she hired lab technicians with her own research fund to support her postdoctoral fellows after they had babies so that they were allowed to leave by 6. This carried on into Glimcher's involvement with the National Institutes of Health to create a similar postdoc grant program caring for family members. Glimcher served on the 2005 Larry Summers Task Force for Women in Science and Engineering, where she expressed her disappointment in the rate of progress for women in science. She joined this task force after a controversy was sparked when former Harvard president Larry Summers suggested that women might be able to innately do less in science. Although she was on the Larry Summers committee, Glimcher still believes that there is still more work to be done. She was quoted as saying: "There are not enough women in senior leadership positions, period. It hasn't gotten a heck of a lot better since I was in medical school." After she was appointed to Cornell's medical school she immediately made changes regarding women's rights. She established paid maternity leave, created daycare centers and another postdoc grant program for primary caregivers. Upon arriving at Cornell there were 0 out of 19 clinical department chairs filled by women; as of today there are 2. From October 2015 to February 2016, Glimcher was the target of eight protests by animal rights activists angered by New York Blood Center's abandonment of 66 chimpanzees that had been used in medical research; Glimcher was a member of the board of directors, which had voted to stop paying for care of the chimpanzees before she joined it.