Dr. Monica Lam

Professor

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Biography

Professor Lam's current research interest is to create effective, reliable AI assistants that accelerate the discovery of knowledge. The OVAL lab has developed numerous open-source LLM-based tools for consumers, historians, and journalists; currently, Lam's focus is on research assistants that uncover new insights in biomedicine and technical fields. Her team has created a conversational agent that is quantifiably factual and engaging, which won the Research Year Award from the Wikimedia Foundation. Additionally, she pioneered a deep research agent, STORM, utilized by millions of users, and developed a leading agent that integrates knowledge from hybrid sources, including databases and knowledge graphs. Moreover, her framework produces fluent, task-oriented agents while minimizing hallucinations. Professor Lam is also an expert in compilers for high-performance machines, and her pioneering work on affine partitioning offers a cohesive theory in loop transformations for parallelism and locality. Her software pipelining algorithm is used in commercial systems to enhance instruction-level parallelism. Her research team has created the widely adopted research compiler, SUIF, and she is a co-author of the classic compiler textbook known as the ‘dragon book’. Lam is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Research Interests

Awards

#2024

Research Year Award

#2022

ASPLOS Influential Paper Award

#2021

ASPLOS Influential Paper Award

#2019

Member

#2018

Computer Science 50th Anniversary Research Award

#2007

Fellow

#2002

SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

#2001

Influential Programming Language Design Implementation Paper Award

#1992

Young Investigator Award

Courses

CS 224V CS 243 CS 499 CS 499P CS 390A CS 390B CS 390C CS 399 CS 399P CS 199 CS 199P CS 390D CS 192 CS 191 CS 195 CS 191W

Requirements for Stanford University

Doctorate Program
Requirements
GPA Requirement
Required:3.5
TOEFL
Listening
Required:26
Reading
Required:26
Writing
Required:26
Speaking
Required:26
Total
Required:100
GRE General
Verbal
Required:160
Quantitative
Required:165
Analytical Writing
Required:4.5
Overall
Required:4.5
Prerequisites
Bachelor degree from an accredited institution Strong background in mathematics and programming
Application Checklist
  • Statement of Purpose
  • Three letters of recommendation
  • Official transcripts
  • Resume/CV
Specialization Notes

The Computer Science department emphasizes research potential. GRE General is currently optional but recommended for some tracks.