Born in the state of Washington on the Columbia River, Tim Lawton moved to California during the defense boom of the 1950s and attended public school in Oakland. He earned his A.B. from the University of California, his M.S. from Stanford University, and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. During summers from 1971-1980, he worked as a professional river guide in the California foothills, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and the Grand Canyon.

His main research focus has been on the relation of sedimentation to active deformation, particularly in foreland-basin settings. He has employed clastic petrology, stratigraphic correlation, and structural relations in growth strata to infer thrust timing and kinematics in Utah, the Ebro Basin of Spain, and northeastern Mexico. More recently, he has expanded his study of syndeformational sedimentation to Jurassic extension and Laramide inversion in the Bisbee Basin of Arizona, New Mexico and Sonora and to salt-tectonic deformation in northeastern Mexico and the Paradox Basin of Utah. He has also employed detrital zircon U-Pb geochronological analysis to provenance and paleogeographic topics in the US and Mexican Cordillera. His principal teaching assignments have included university classes in introductory geology, field geology, petroleum geology, basin analysis, sandstone petrology, exploration seismology, Cordilleran tectonics, sedimentology, and stratigraphy, as well as field courses in salt tectonics for industry and academic geologists.