A career that nearly began on the football field instead of in the operating room culminated at VAM 2026 in the highest honor of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), as Peter Lawrence, MD, received the SVS Lifetime Achievement Award for a body of work spanning more than four decades in vascular surgery, education and research.
Lawrence’s career includes chief of vascular surgery posts at the University of Utah and UCLA, a term as dean for clinical affairs at UC Irvine, more than 500 published articles and book chapters and founding the Vascular Low Frequency Disease Consortium, an international research collaboration with more than 250 investigators. Lawrence’s surgical textbook is used in most U.S. medical school clerkships and he served as senior editor of the Journal of Vascular Surgery.
Lawrence traced his path to the vascular surgery field back to a single moment during his surgical training at Harvard Medical School, when a planned career in orthopedic surgery gave way to something else entirely.
“When Chilton Crane clamped the aorta and opened it, I realized I wanted to become a vascular surgeon rather than an orthopedic surgeon,” said Lawrence.
That decision led him through training at Columbia Presbyterian, a formative faculty post at the University of Utah and ultimately 23 years at UCLA, where he led the Gonda Vascular Center and helped train a new generation of vascular surgeons. Accepting the award, Lawrence returned to a lesson learned long before medicine, one drawn from his years as a college athlete at Dartmouth.
“Surround yourself with great teammates if you want to play on a winning team,” said Lawrence. “It’s never only about you and awards like this are never given to those on losing teams.”
Lawrence credited mentors, co-editors, research collaborators and colleagues at every stage of his career, along with his wife, Karen. “I’ve had great teammates who have helped me in so many ways throughout my career,” said Lawrence.
