Lauran Hartley is Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She also teaches regularly as Adjunct Assistant Professor for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and previously taught courses on Tibetan literature and religion at Indiana and Rutgers universities. In addition to co-editing the book Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008) and serving as Inner Asian Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies, she has also published several literary translations and articles on Tibetan intellectual history and discourse from the eighteenth century to the present. She received her PhD at Indiana University in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies.

From 2007 to October 2021, Dr. Hartley served as Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University. In this capacity, she led several major projects, including a successful revision of the Library of Congress Tibetan Romanization Table; conversion of 20,000+ legacy records in the OCLC WorldCat database; a Tibetan Special Collections digitization project at Columbia University; and a range of conferences, such as "Tibetan Studies and the Social Sciences: Data, Tools, Maps and Archives;" "Tibetan Buddhist Networking in the 18th Century: Lives and Letters;" and "Linked Open Data in Buddhist and Tibetan Studies" (co-hosted with the Buddhist Digital Resource Center). Dr. Hartley worked on these projects and others in partnership with the Henry Luce Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, University of Toronto, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation. She is also co-founder—together with Susan Meinheit (Library of Congress) —of the Tibetan Resources Working Group.