CBE Energy Seminar Speaker: Maha Haji

Description

Maha Haji joined the Cornell University faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and a Systems Engineering field member in 2021. She leads the newly formed Symbiotic Engineering and Analysis (SEA) Lab, which develops interdisciplinary symbiotic solutions to advance sustainable offshore technologies vital to the growth of the Blue Economy and the mitigation of climate change. In particular, the SEA Lab develop designs for offshore systems to sustainably harvest resources from the ocean such as power, water, and food, as well as mineral resources key to the progress of clean energy.

Previously, Maha was an MAE Faculty Fellow at Cornell and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Engineering Systems Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT where her research focused on utilizing multidisciplinary design optimization to develop a floating platform, known as PEARL, to provide recharging and data offloading capacity for autonomous underwater vehicles. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical and Oceanographic Engineering in 2017 from the Joint Program between MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she focused on the design and prototyping of a symbiotic system to harvest uranium from seawater. Prof. Haji has worked in industry as an engineering consultant at ATA Engineering, where she used analysis-driven design to solve problems ranging from aircraft and rockets to robotics and rollercoasters. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.