[2] After briefly working in industry, she became a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982, and was promoted to full professor there in 1993.
She visited Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1998 and moved there permanently as a chair professor of engineering in 2000.
[2] Lau was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001, "for contributions to III-V compound semiconductor heterostructure materials and devices".
[3] She was elected to the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2016,[1] and is also an OSA Fellow.
[2] In 2020, she received the Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, "For significant contributions to hetero-epitaxy of compound semiconductors on silicon for future integrated lasers and advancing the field of light-emitting diode microdisplays.