Background
Lawrence was born on July 30, 1909 in Boston to Theodora (née Eldredge) and Harris Hooper Lawrence, their third child.
Lawrence was born on July 30, 1909 in Boston to Theodora (née Eldredge) and Harris Hooper Lawrence, their third child.
Vassar College.
After taking a position at Harvard, she took her first trip to do field research on the howler monkeys of East Africa, where she returned on other trips. In 1936 and 1937, she traveled to the Philippines and Sumatra to study bats. While working at Harvard, she pioneered the practice of collecting full skeletons of mammals.
She also traveled to Nyasaland (modern-day Malawi) in her field studies of mammals.
Lawrence did field work in New Mexico and Iraq on the evolution of domesticated animals, and later went to Turkey to study fossil dogs there. Barbara Lawrence died in 1997.
The Society of Ethnobiology awards the Lawrence Award each year to a promising graduate student in ethnobiology.