Prof. Lau with her students in the lab: “I love to see things work rather than solving equations.” 13 IN FOCUS students that connectivity is the most important attribute. When students complain that what they learn is not useful, I would say that it is not that the material is useless, but that they have yet to gure out how to link up the newly acquired information with their experience and knowledge.” Born in Hong Kong and a graduate of Pui Ching Middle School, Prof. Lau went to the US for higher education, earning her BS and MS in physics from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and a PhD in electrical engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Given that electrical engineering is largely based on physics, with engineers adapting the laws of physics to originate useful new applications, she saw her move into the area as a natural t for her interest. Following her doctorate, Prof. Lau worked in the US in industry, then moved back to academia at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) in the s. In , she became the rst woman to gain promotion to full professor in the university’s College of Engineering. Her initial connection with HKUST was as a visiting professor in . Two years later, she le UMass to join the School of Engineering at HKUST. According to Prof. Lau, a major reason that fewer women enroll in engineering programs is that multi-talented girls o en have many options to choose from, be it in the arts, business, or medicine. Or they might get “pushed” into areas seen as more lucrative by their family, she said. To young females undecided about a future direction, she suggests engineering can provide rigorous training in problem solving as well as analytical skills, which will be highly useful no matter what direction they eventually embark on. It is much easier changing from engineering or science to business or liberal arts than the other way around. In her own case, despite the numerical male-female imbalance in the engineering eld overall, Prof. Lau said she has never let gender limit her career choice, which has seen her combine leading-edge research with teaching and raising a family. “Perhaps my personality of not caring too much about others’ opinion on what I should or should not do helps,” she said. “For young women who aspire to be successful professionals, deciding on their own destiny matters the most.” This approach has certainly seen her succeed in her career. Along with the recent J. J. Thomson Medal, she is a recipient of the Optical Society (OSA)’s Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, IEEE Photonics Society Aron Kressel Award, and US National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Award for Women Scientists and Engineers. She is also a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, and the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences. Such recognition from her peers is highly encouraging for all the researchers in her group, she said. But there are still many research problems yet to be explored. Her current focus is the integration of electronics and photonics, with her research group recently achieving a breakthrough by developing the world’s rst bu erless telecommunication wavelength ( . micro-meter) III-V semiconductor lasers grown directly on industry-standard -nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers. The innovation brings the prospect of major improvements to the infrastructure of high-speed network communications in data centers a step closer. This in turn could potentially lead to faster, cheaper services as well as novel applications. “A vast amount of data needs to be transmitted and processed swi ly and e ciently at any instance,” she said. “The smaller the electronic circuits are, the quicker the signal passes. Transistors can now be fabricated as small as a few nanometers. Light (photons) in integrated circuits could help speed up data transmission much further. How to enhance the performance of semiconductor photonic integrated circuits? This is what we are now researching, and it is a never-ending task.”
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