Alaine has worked at MIT and Arizona State University in various roles including teaching assistant, research assistant, research associate and visiting scientist.

For her scientific work, she spent many years working on experiments to study aspects of nucleon interaction at the MIT Bates Linear Accelerator. For those experiments, the team needed to design, build and calibrate new magnetic spectrometers, with new detectors, data acquisition and analysis systems. This allowed them to study nature first-hand precisely and accurately from an angle that no one was able to look at previously.

For her teaching background, she taught multiple introductory physics recitation classes and lab classes at US universities to science and engineering students. After she came back to Hong Kong, she joined ITS in early 2007 and has since been teaching physics continuously for many years to mostly secondary school students in various curricula, including IB, A-Levels, IGCSE, HKDSE and others.

She helps students with different abilities and backgrounds to improve their exam grades by ensuring they understand physics in the same way as how physicists understand them. And to get a better idea of actual understanding of STEM applications among students, she has volunteered at a number of STEM/Innovation workshops and competitions for secondary school or university students, acting as either a mentor or a judge.

On becoming a teacher:

I enjoy showing students how amazing our understanding of the physics is. And I enjoy the challenge to make physics easy and accessible to everyone willing to learn. I also love to see the excitement of a student exclaiming, “I get it! That’s easy!”

Other interests that reflect on my personality as a teacher:

I love learning all kinds of things that is new to me. For example, I have finally learned how to swim freestyle last summer after struggling to learn it on and off since secondary school. Every time when I try to learn something new, I gain a new skill or a new perspective to look at the world. To me it is always enjoyable and beneficial.

People I find inspirational and why:

That would be my PhD advisor, Professor Ricardo Alarcon. There are many great physicists that had made amazing contribution to the field that I had read about. But I do not know most of them or how they did their work. But I do recall seeing up close how with hard work and perseverance, Professor Alarcon was able to bring a multi-million US dollars experiment proposal that was considered dead (not funded) back to life (received funding).

The proposal was for building a very sophisticated spectrometer system that would satisfied all the wishes of everyone in the collaboration to look at all aspect of the physics they were trying to study. There were many famous physicists in the collaboration and everyone was hopeful that they would get the funding for the project because it was so great for the advancement of physics. The proposal was turned down by the funding agency because it was too expensive. Most of the collaborators gave up except for a few who are willing to keep working on it with Professor Alarcon. Together they worked hard to revise the design to lower the cost without sacrificing the key aspects needed for the experiments. Watching him in action made me understand that doing physics in real world is about finding ways to advance our knowledge with realistic support from society at large. We can only go as far and as fast as the society around us is willing to support.

I admire Professor Alarcon for being able to aim for the ideal and be realistic enough to make it happen.

Professor Robert L. Jaffe of MIT. In addition to his contribution in theoretical physics, he was an amazing teacher.

I had always find physics easy until I started to study quantum mechanics. I was able to get an A in my undergraduate course without true understanding. I was very unhappy about it. Everyone I talked to treated quantum mechanics as just mathematics. And they were satisfied that somehow, without knowing why, the mathematics allows correct prediction to be made. To me that is not physics. Things started to change when I took the quantum mechanics course taught by Professor Jaffe. He had a crystal clear understanding of it, and he made it easy to learn. The physics being addressed by quantum mechanics is very interesting and different from our daily lives. Even Einstein had ponder long and hard about it. Professor Jaffe was able to show me how the mathematics formalism of it can be understood. And that opened the door for me to keep deepening my understanding of not just quantum mechanics, but other areas of physics as well.

I hope I can be as good as Professor Jaffee in showing to my students that physics has a lot more to it than just mathematical manipulations.

Top tip to younger self:

Listen to what others say. Do not ignore ideas or advices that others keep telling me without serious consideration. There must be some reason behind repeated advices from different people.