Peter Lawrence graduated from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School (AOA) and did his surgical residency and vascular surgery fellowship at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. He moved to the University of Utah in 1978 and became Chief of Surgery at the VA, Chief of the Vascular Surgery Division, as well as program director of the fellowship training program in vascular surgery.

In 1998 he moved to UCI as the Dean for Clinical Affairs for 5 years before being recruited to UCLA to become the Bergman Chair in Vascular Research, Wiley Barker Chief of Vascular Surgery, and Director of the Gonda Vascular Center. Dr. Lawrence has published over 300 articles, editorials, and book chapters related to aneurysms, limb salvage, and venous disease.

Among his most important contributions is the founding of the Vascular Low Frequency Disease Consortium in 2003, a collaborative research program comprised of 129 institutions and 260 authors worldwide, including the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Over 20 years, the consortium has published 26 peer reviewed papers on 5,565 patients which have been cited 1014 times in other journals. His textbook, Essentials of General Surgery and Surgical Specialties, currently in its 7^th edition, is used as the surgery clerkship textbook at >70% of US medical schools.

He was the senior editor of the four Journal of Vascular Surgery Journals for six years and has been president of six societies, including the Society for Vascular Surgery, Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery, Western Vascular Society, and Association for Surgical Education. He was chair of the SVS Vascular Disease Foundation from 2018-22. In 2018 he received the Dartmouth Medical School Alumni Career Achievement Award.