Professor Lam received a BSc (1st Hons.) degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Manchester and was awarded the Ashbury Scholarship, the A.H. Gibson Prize, and the H. Wright Baker Prize for his academic performance. He obtained the MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. Professor Lam is a Croucher Scholar, Croucher Fellow, Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Cheung Kong Chair Professor. Before joining the University of Hong Kong in 1993, where he is now Chair Professor of Control Engineering, he was a lecturer at the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Melbourne.

Professor Lam is the Editor-in-Chief of IET Control Theory & Applications, Journal of The Franklin Institute, and Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems & Control Engineering. He is a Subject Editor of Journal of Sound and Vibration, Editor of Asian Journal of Control, Senior Editor of Cogent Engineering, Section Editor of IET Journal of Engineering, Associate Editor of Automatica, International Journal of Systems Science, Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing. He is currently a member of the Engineering Panel (Joint Research Schemes), Research Grant Council, HKSAR. His research interests include model reduction, robust synthesis, positive systems, networked control systems, multi-agent systems, UAVs, and vibration control. He is a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021) and Computer Science (2015).

His Erdos number is 3, WoS H-index is 96.