She married William E. Schevill on December 23, 1938, while still attending Vassar College, where she was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1931.
She collaborated with her husband, William Schevill, on studies of cetacean communication and echolocation, where they made the first recordings of porpoise and whale calls, forming in many ways the founding framework for “literally hundreds of scientific studies produced by other workers from the 1960s until the present day.
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.
[1][2] She was especially known for her work in canids:[5] her 1967 collaboration with William Bossert on the genus Canis was noted for its innovative application of statistics to evolutionary and ecological questions.
[6] Barbara Lawrence died in 1997, three years after her husband's death and survived by her daughter, Lee, and son, Edward.