Department of Computer
Science
The University of Texas at Austin
Biographical Sketch
Simon S. Lam is
Professor Emeritus and Regents Chair Emeritus in Computer Science #1 at the University of Texas at
Austin. He received the BSEE degree with Distinction from Washington State
University, Pullman, in 1969, He was the 1969 College of Engineering
Outstanding Senior in Electrical Engineering (certificate).
He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
Engineering from UCLA in 1970 and 1974, respectively.
From 1971 to 1974, he was a Postgraduate Research Engineer at the
ARPANET
Measurement Center, UCLA, where he worked on packet switching techniques for
satellite and radio channels. From 1974 to 1977, he was a Research Staff Member
at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Since 1977,
he has been on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He served as
Department Chair from 1992 to 1994. His research interests are in Internet
security services, computer network protocol design, protocol verification, and performance analysis.
Professor Lam was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 2007 with the citation, ''For
contributions to computer network protocols and network security services.''
He is a co-recipient of the 2004 Software System Award
from
ACM with
the
citation,
"For inventing secure sockets and prototyping the first secure sockets layer
(named SNP -
Secure Network Programming) as a high-level
abstraction suitable for securing Internet applications."
He received the 2004
SIGCOMM
Award
from ACM for lifetime contributions to the
field of communications networks with the citation "in recognition of
his
vision, breadth, and rigor in contributing to, among other areas: secure
network
communication, the analysis of network and multiaccess protocols, the
analysis
of queueing networks, and the design of mechanisms for quality of
service."
He received the 2004
W. Wallace McDowell Award
from IEEE Computer Society with the
citation, "For outstanding
fundamental
contributions in network protocols and security services."
He is a co-recipient of the 1975 Leonard G.
Abraham Prize in the field of communications systems (certificate)
and the 2001
William R.
Bennett Prize
in the field of communications networking from IEEE Communications
Society. He is an
IEEE
Fellow (elected 1985) and an
ACM Fellow (elected 1998). He is a member
of the
Academy of Medicine, Engineering and
Science of Texas (elected 2007). He received a Teaching Excellence
Award form the College of Natural Sciences in 2007. Professor Lam was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
from
1995 to 1999. He served on the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Networking,
Computer Networks, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE
Transactions on
Communications, Proceedings of the IEEE, and Performance
Evaluation. He co-founded the ACM SIGCOMM conference in 1983 which was
held on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin
(Proceedings front matter)
and also the IEEE
International Conference on Network Protocols in 1993.
Personal Simon S. Lam was born in Macau
in 1947
with the family name
林 and the given name
善成
(Lam Sin Sing or Lam Shin Sing).
He moved with his
family to Hong Kong in 1959. He attended La Salle College,
Kowloon, Hong Kong from 1961 to 1966. He passed the Hong Kong English School
Certificate
Examination in 1965 and was awarded a Hong Kong Government
Scholarship. He
took the University of London G.C.E. Examination in 1966 and left Hong
Kong on
September 7, 1966 on his way to attend Washington State
University,
Pullman, Washington. He met his wife, Amy, in 1969 at
UCLA. They have one child, Eric.
Last updated, 11/23/2021