Professor Lam graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1984 and received his MS & PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1988. He is now a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He has served as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Engineering from 2001 to 2006.

Professor Lam loves teaching, especially in theoretical subjects. He received a teaching excellence award from the department six times in 97, 00, 02, 05, 06 and 08. While some say that the quality of students today keeps on declining, he finds it even more satisfying to teach - he believes that it is a professor's challenge to devise effective ways to inspire students.

Professor Lam's research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms for different applications such as on-line scheduling, computational biology, and compressed indexing. After years of research, he has accumulated a long list of open problems to keep himself busy all the time, and has also published extensively in a number of prestigious international conferences and journals. Eight doctoral students have graduated under his supervision; most of them remain as academics in research institutions.