She is Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive & Child Health (MARCH) Centre.

She developed the epidemiological evidence for the worldwide policy and programming that looks to reduce neonatal deaths and stillbirths and works on large-scale implementation research.

Lawn's mother was a teacher and missionary in northern Uganda[3] who suffered from an obstructed labour and was transferred to a bush hospital where the medic had never performed a caesarean section before.

[6][7] The BBC documentary, Invisible Lives, found that Nepal and Malawi were some of the few countries on track to meet the United Nations development goal to end the death of children under 5.

[10] With the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Lawn developed a massive open online course on women's health that was delivered to over 26,000 participants from 130 countries.

[15][16] She worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to identify that in 2008 there were 2.65 million stillbirths worldwide, with 67% occurring in rural families.

[20] Lawn works on improving community engagement with national policy on healthcare, emphasising that in some countries people will choose to give birth at home even when there are nearby facilities, especially if quality of care is poor.

Improving the quality of care at birth in hospitals could save 2 million lives a year [21][22] Lawn's The Lancet Neonatal Survival Series (2005) was followed ten years later by the Every Newborn Series, which advocated for quality care, facilities and community action at birth.

[31] Lawn works on Group B streptococcal infection, hoping to improve health system measurements and intervention trials.

[4] In estimates published with Anna Seale and 103 other authors, Group B Strep was found to be responsible for at least 150,000 preventable infant deaths and stillbirths a year.