Professor Simon Lam received his Ph.D. in 1974 from UCLA where he worked on the ARPANET. In 1977, he left IBM Research to join UTCS as an Assistant Professor, was promoted through the ranks, and retired in 2018. His most important research contribution to society is the invention of secure sockets and prototype implementation of the first secure sockets layer (SNP) in 1993 for Internet applications. This work was published and presented in the 1994 USENIX Summer Technical Conference. Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL and TLS), re-implemented several years later using key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce on WWW and are now widely used to secure email and other Internet applications. For this contribution, Professor Lam and three students in his research project won the 2004 ACM Software System Award. He was elected to National Academy of Engineering in 2007.