Rate My Professor An Lau

Dr. Annie Lau is a Senior Lecturer in the School of the Environment at the University of Queensland. She obtained her BSc (Hons) and MPhil from the University of Hong Kong and her PhD from the National University of Singapore. A coastal geomorphologist, her research centers on reconstructing histories of extreme coastal hazards, including storm waves and tsunamis, through sedimentary, geomorphological, and historical analyses. She employs characteristics of large coastal boulders, such as size and distribution, to estimate wave intensities and chronicle events over millennia across tropical Asia-Pacific islands. Her investigations also encompass late Quaternary-Holocene coastline evolution along Central and Southern Queensland's sandy shores, utilizing optically stimulated luminescence dating of quartz sediments. Additionally, she explores broader natural hazards and disaster management. Lau serves as project leader for IGCP Project 725 on Forecasting Coastal Change and the ISROC initiative on Inundation Signatures on Rocky Coastlines, contributing to global resources like the ISROC-DB for coastal boulder deposits.

In her academic career at UQ, Lau delivers courses in geography, marine science, and geoscience, including the Environmental Hazards unit. She supervises PhD candidates on coastal hazard topics and acts as a media expert. Her publications feature the book Reef-Platform Coral Boulders: Evidence for High-Energy Marine Inundation Events on Tropical Coastlines (Springer, 2013; with James P. Terry and Samuel Etienne), the chapter Spatial patterns of subaerial coarse clasts (Elsevier, 2020), and peer-reviewed articles such as Discovery of the world's largest cliff-top boulder: Initial insights and numerical simulation of its transport on a 30–40 m high cliff on Tongatapu (Tonga) (Marine Geology, 2025), Understanding extreme-wave hazards on high-energy coasts requires a standardised approach to field data collection (Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 2025), Holocene geomorphological evolution of a sediment-starved coastal embayment in response to sea level change: Insights from the Qing'ao Embayment, southern China (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 2024), Giant palaeotsunami in Kiribati: converging evidence from geology and oral history (Island Arc, 2021), and Clustered, stacked and imbricated large coastal rock clasts on Ludao Island, southeast Taiwan (Frontiers in Earth Science, 2021). Her research is supported by grants including from the Australia & Pacific Science Foundation (2022-2026), ARC Linkage Infrastructure (2024-2025), and UQ Early Career Researcher (2018-2020), informing coastal risk assessment and management.