Laila obtained her Pharmacy degree from Liverpool John Moores University in 1999 and subsequently qualified as a pharmacist in the UK in 2000. She was then awarded the Overseas Research Student Award (ORSA) from the University of London for academically outstanding students to pursue a PhD in the field of gene therapy at King’s College London.
After completing her PhD in 2004, she was awarded the highly prestigious CW Maplethorpe Postdoctoral Research and Teaching fellowship. This was followed by an EPSRC post-doctoral fellowship and a lectureship at King’s College London. Throughout these positions, Laila was highly engaged in both teaching and research, leading her to be granted the "lecturer of the year" award based on student votes. Additionally, she made significant contributions to the discovery of various novel gene therapy and silencing vectors and understanding their structures and properties using sophisticated techniques such as Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS).
In 2018, she joined the University of Brighton as a senior lecturer, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, she conducted a study on the stability of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The findings of this study, published in BMJ Open Science, proved instrumental in guiding practice at vaccination centres and provided valuable insight into the stability and efficacy of the vaccine upon handling and administration.
In 2022, Laila embraced a new opportunity to further her academic pursuits by joining the University of Birmingham's Dubai campus as an Associate Professor and a postgraduate research lead in Biomedical Sciences.