Dr. Lawrence is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC). He received his B.S. from Allegheny College in 1992 and Ph.D. from the Neuroscience Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. His laboratory has historically focused on learning and memory operations within the mammalian hippocampus. As a postdoctoral fellow and staff scientist at the NIH, he focused on specific circuits in the hippocampus. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Montana, his NIH/NINDS-funded laboratory focused on understanding how synapses from the medial septum-diagonal band of Broca (MS-DBB) impact the excitability of specific hippocampal cell types. Since joining TTUHSC, he has become affiliated with the Garrison Institute on Aging, the Center of Excellence for Translational Neuroscience and Therapeutics, and the Center for Excellence in Integrated Health, which provided him with an integrative understanding of how Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis impacts learning in the hippocampus. He is currently funded through two NIH/NIA R01 grants that investigate the relationship between vitamin A status and Alzheimer's disease. He maintains several active research collaborations with TTU faculty across Engineering, Biology, Nutritional Sciences, and the Center for Biotechnology and Genomics.

Dr. Lawrence is the current President and Chapter Representative for the newly established West Texas Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Lawrence conducted an undergraduate senior thesis at Allegheny College and remains an advocate in promoting undergraduate student research opportunities in the laboratory during the summer and academic year through collaborations with the TTUHSC Summer Accelerated Biomedical Research Program, TTUHSC Student Research Week, CISER, the TTU Undergraduate Research Scholars program, and Center for Transformative Undergraduate Experiences. He has participated in outreach events in coordination with the TTU STEM CORE to promote Neuroscience research opportunities at TTU, TTUHSC, and across West Texas. He has previously taught undergraduate Neuroscience and is currently a Course Director for a graduate Translational Neuroscience and Pharmacology course at TTUHSC.