Prof. Ronald Lau has spent over two decades at HKUST. While the university has been a rich chapter in his professional career, it has also been the backdrop to his family life: his four sons grew up on campus and chose to study at the university themselves. Prof. Ronald Lau was teaching in the US when he got a call from HKUST looking for a professor with his international business and pedagogical experience. He packed up his young family and relocated to Hong Kong. Impressed by HKUST’s culture of research and multicultural campus, and thrilled to find Hong Kong students were ambitious, knowledgeable, and eager to learn, Prof. Lau put down roots with his family and set to work here sharing his specialized expertise in operations management. Operations management is an area of business concerned with managing the process of creating goods and services. Prioritizing efficiency and looking for ways to improve is something Prof. Lau has always applied in his life. Having previously worked as a costs and operations analyst, he frequently draws upon his own experiences in his teaching, and, as his sons attest, he shares his wisdom at home, too. “When we were young, dad would make us evaluate the efficiency of our grocery shopping. How many boxes of cereal and milk should we buy — and how fast could we finish them before they all expired?” says Michael, Prof. Lau’s second son, “We were trained to think rationally from a young age.” 29
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