[4] After serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, he joined AT&T's Bell Laboratories in 1965 to engage in engineering and scientific research on Earth’s radiation belts, the existence of which was confirmed a few years earlier by James Van Allen.

Furthermore, Lanzerotti has been awarded many NSF research grants[6] including as the principal investigator for instruments aboard the Ulysses mission over the poles of the Sun, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and more recently the Van Allen Probes, launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts.

Much of his research has involved close collaborations with telecommunications service providers on commercial satellite and long-haul (principally transoceanic) cables.

Lanzerotti has served as principal investigator or co-investigator on several United States NASA interplanetary and planetary missions including ATS-1&3, IMP-4&5, Voyager 1&2, Ulysses, Galileo Orbiter and Entry Probe, ACE, and Cassini.

Currently, he is a Principal Investigator with instruments on each of the two spacecraft in the NASA Van Allen Probes mission launched August 2012.

He has also conducted geophysical research in the Antarctic and the Arctic beginning in the 1970s, directed largely toward understanding of Earth's upper atmosphere and space environments.