Dr. Lawlor received an M.D. from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) in 1989. She completed a general medical/surgical internship at Greater Victoria Hospitals in Victoria, British Columbia followed by residency training in pediatrics at the University of Ottawa, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (Ottawa, Ontario) from 1991-1994 where she served as Chief Resident from 1993-1994. She served as Clinical Fellow (1994-1996) and Research Fellow (1996-2001) in Pediatric Hematology-Oncology & Bone Marrow Transplantation at the University of British Columbia, BC's Children's Hospital (Vancouver, British Columbia). Dr. Lawlor received her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia in 2002. She completed post-doctoral training with Dr. G.I. Evan at the USCF Cancer Research Institute in San Francisco, California from 2001-2004. Dr. Lawlor accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California in 2004. Since 2010 she has been at the University of Michigan where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics & Communicable Diseases and in the Department of Pathology. She is also the Russell G. Adderley Professor of Pediatric Oncology

 Dr. Lawlor’s research is focused on investigating how hijacking of normal stem cell and developmental processes contributes to the initiation and progression of Ewing sarcoma. The central hypothesis underlying her research program is that pediatric cancers depend on dysregulation of genes and pathways that are integral to normal stem cell biology. The overall goal is to discover and define similarities and differences between normal stem cells and cancer cells. To achieve this, her lab uses human stem cell models as well as mouse models and tumor cell lines.