Maha Haji

Maha Haji is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering, where she leads the Symbiotic Engineering and Analysis (SEA) Lab. Her research focuses on the design and multidisciplinary optimization of symbiotic offshore systems that sustainably harvest resources from the ocean, including renewable energy, freshwater, food, and critical minerals for the clean-energy transition. Her group develops computational tools for marine hydrodynamics and design optimization, including a fully differentiable boundary element solver based on automatic differentiation that enables sensitivity analysis and optimization of wave-structure interactions for wave energy converters and other offshore renewables. Applications span offshore wind, wave energy, autonomous underwater vehicle servicing platforms, and seawater mineral extraction.