He received a master's degree in 1957,[2] and took a hiatus in his studies, during which he briefly went to law school and worked in the U.S. Army, at a grinding wheel company,[3] and as an electrical engineer at Sylvania from 1959 to 1961.
[6] At Berkeley, Lawler's doctoral students included Marshall Bern, Chip Martel, Arvind Raghunathan, Arnie Rosenthal, Huzur Saran, David Shmoys, and Tandy Warnow.
He played a central role in rescuing the ellipsoid method for linear programming from obscurity in the West.
[1][9] He also wrote (with D. E. Wood) a heavily cited 1966 survey on branch and bound algorithms,[10] selected as a citation classic in 1987,[2] and another influential early paper on dynamic programming with J. M.
[15] In the late 1980s, Lawler shifted his research focus to problems of computational biology, including the reconstruction of evolutionary trees and several works on sequence alignment.