Dr. Monica Lam has been a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University since 1988, and is the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory. Starting from 2008, as a co-PI of the NSF Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) 2020 Expedition, she has focused on creating open software to protect user privacy and disrupt monopolies. She is currently leading Almond, an open programmable virtual assistant project, which protects privacy through user-friendly decentralized systems.
Dr. Lam has made significant contributions to the fields of compilers and architectures for high-performance computing, and open communication platforms for mobile computing. Her research results have been widely used in academia as well as in industry, including two startups she helped found: Tensilica, a configurable processor core company and Omlet, an open mobile-gaming social network company.
Prof. Lam is an ACM Fellow, has won ACM-SIGARCH, ACM-PLDI, ACM-SIGSOFT Most Influential and Best Paper Awards, and has published over 150 papers on compilers, computer architecture, operating systems, high-performance computing, databases, security, and human-computer interaction. She is an author of the Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools, also known as the "Dragon Book", the definitive text on compiler technology. She received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia (1980) and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (1987).