Michael Scott Lawrence is an American geneticist best known for his work on mutational signatures.

[3] He later received his post-doctoral training in David R. Liu's laboratory at the Harvard University from 2005 to 2008.

[4] After completion of his post-doctoral training, Lawrence was affiliated with the Cancer Program of the Broad Institute, where he and his colleagues developed the MutSig algorithm,[1][2] which assesses the mutational significance by correcting for sources of mutational heterogeneity across cancer, including cancer type, mutational spectrum, gene expression, and replication timing.

[5][6] The development of the MutSig algorithm led to the reanalysis of major cancer genome sequencing projects, including The Cancer Genome Atlas, to remove false positives that were present in previous studies.

Since 2017, Lawrence has been named Highly Cited Researcher in the field of Molecular Biology and Genetics by Clarivate.