Monica S. Lam

Timeline

1. 1980–1987

   Degrees at UBC and Carnegie Mellon

   She earns a B.Sc. in computer science at the University of British Columbia in 1980, then an M.S. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1987 at Carnegie Mellon University. Her doctoral thesis, A Systolic Array Optimizing Compiler, is advised by H. T. Kung.

2. 1988–2006

   SUIF and the Dragon Book

   She joins the Stanford computer science faculty in 1988. Her research team creates SUIF, a widely used compiler infrastructure known for its locality optimizations and interprocedural parallelization, and she coauthors the second edition of the compiler textbook known as the Dragon Book, published in 2006.

3. 1998

   Helping start Tensilica

   She takes a sabbatical from Stanford in 1998 to help start Tensilica Inc., a company that specializes in configurable processor cores. She is on the founding team of Tensilica, which is now part of Cadence.

4. 2008–2014

   Open mobile computing and Omlet

   From 2008, she is a co-PI of the NSF Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 Expedition and works on open software that protects user privacy. She directs Stanford's MobiSocial laboratory and co-founds Omlet, an open, decentralized social networking tool that launches in 2014.

5. 2019

   National Academy of Engineering election

   The National Academy of Engineering elects her in 2019 for her research on advanced compiler and analysis systems for high-performance computers. By then she also leads Stanford's Open Virtual Assistant project.

6. 2019–2021

   Almond becomes Genie

   As faculty director of Stanford's Open Virtual Assistant Lab (OVAL), she leads Almond, an open-source virtual assistant designed as an alternative to Alexa and Google Assistant. Almond receives Popular Science's Best of What's New Award in Security in 2019, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards OVAL a $1 million grant for practical prototypes, and in November 2021 the project is renamed Genie.

7. 2023–2024

   WikiChat wins a Wikimedia award

   She coauthors WikiChat, which stops large language model chatbots from hallucinating by grounding them in Wikipedia, with Sina J. Semnani, Violet Z. Yao and Heidi C. Zhang for the Findings of EMNLP 2023. WikiChat wins the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year in 2024.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and OVAL director

   She is the Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford and faculty director of OVAL, where she focuses on research assistants that discover new insights for biomedicine and other technical areas. Her team's STORM, which researches a topic on the web and returns a generated outline covering different viewpoints, has been used by about a million users. Her 2026–27 courses include Agentic AI (CS 224V).