She is the faculty director of the Open Virtual Assistant Lab, which organized the first workshop for the World Wide Voice Web.

[2] The lab developed the open-source Almond voice assistant,[3] which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

In another research project, her program analysis group developed a collection of tools for improving software security and reliability.

She also directed the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford, as part of the Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 initiative.

[11] Lam chaired the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation Conference in 2000, served on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and numerous program committees for conferences on languages and compilers (PLDI, POPL), operating systems (SOSP), and computer architecture (ASPLOS, ISCA).