She was chief scientist at Tensilica Inc. during her sabbatical leave from Stanford in 1998. She led the SUIF (Stanford University Intermediate Format) project, which produced a widely used compiler infrastructure with unique capabilities in memory hierarchy optimizations and interprocedural parallelism. Lam received a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS from the University of British Columbia. She received an NSF Young Investigator award in 1992 and serves on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.