Jesse, try not to take this the wrong way but, rest assured, you ARE getting your ambitions mixed up with your capabilities. Abort the notion immediately. Do not get a lace monitor if all you've ever kept is a turtle. There is no comparison beyond them both being reptiles. It isn't about specific care and regular maintenance, it's about a large, fast moving reptile with sharp teeth that will injure you permanently if you misread the cues and stuff up. All of the research in the world isn't going to give you the experience you need in gauging reptile behaviour. Heads of biology at universities aren't the people you should be speaking to, either. Even their field assistants, who are probably doing the hands-on work, will be trapping and or catching wild lace monitors rather than looking after captives. Captives have a much greater potential to cause damage than wild monitors because people working on wild monitors tend to restrain them to prevent injury. Even the understanding that your captive is not going to be a 'touchy-feely pet' doesn't take away from the fact that you'll still have to enter its enclosure for feeding and cleaning and even really 'tame' monitors will sometimes switch into 'food-brain' mode at inappropriate times. They'll catch you off guard if you've had little reptile experience and that's where the injuries happen. As you read this, take a good look at your hands and ask yourself if you can afford to risk losing functionality of one or more digits, for that's pretty much what's at stake with a bad bite.
I repeat, do NOT get a lace monitor. This is coming from someone that has very 'tame' lace monitors and has been breeding them for years (and is also a trained biologist, if that's important to you). This is not a personal attack, but someone giving advice on the basis of experience with the animal in question.