Prof. Lau Kei May received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in Houston, Texas. After a two-year stint in the industry, she joined the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, where she became a full professor in 1993.  She joined the regular faculty of HKUST since the summer of 2000 and established the Photonics Technology Center for devoted efforts in compound semiconductor materials and devices.

Prof. Lau’s work is focused on the development of monolithic integration of III-V devices on industry-standard silicon. Lau combines innovation in MOCVD-based growth of hetero-structure materials with insights into both device physics and fabrication to improved device performance, to effective multi-device integration. The benefits of integrating high-performance III-V based devices onto a silicon substrate strongly leverages the enormous capabilities and infrastructure of the Si CMOS industry, extending them to photonic and electronic integrated devices/circuits at high frequencies.  She is recognized for her work in heteroepitaxy of III-V photonics (lasers, LEDs and photodetectors) and electronics (millimeter wave, logic and power transistors), as well as GaN LEDs on Si substrates. She also developed LED-on-Silicon (LEDoS) technology for integrating LEDs arrays addressable with a silicon active matrix for augmented reality (AR) and/or virtual reality (VR) applications.

Prof. Lau is a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, and the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences. She is also a recipient of the IET J J Thomson medal, OSA Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, IEEE Photonics Society Aron Kressel Award, US National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Awards for Women (FAW) Scientists and Engineers (1991) and Hong Kong Croucher Senior Research Fellowship (2008). She served on the IEEE Electron Devices Society Administrative Committee and was an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (1996-2002) and Electron Device Letters (2016-2019), an Associate Editor for the Journal of Crystal Growth and Applied Physics Letters.