Ph.D. Candidate,

I am working towards a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering in Professor Heidi Nepf‘s group at the Parsons Lab for Environmental Science and Engineering at MIT.  Broadly, my research examines how physical processes affect biological function in aquatic environments.  My Ph.D. research in the Nepf Group focuses on the interaction between flow and aquatic vegetation.  Occasionally, I pretend to be a member of the Stocker Microfluidics Group, where I have pursued two projects at a very different (tiny!) scale.  Completed research projects can be found here.

I am also an enthusiastic (not to be confused with skilled) photographer, and an avid soccer and cricket fan.  You can find my musings on these here.

My CV is available here.

Refereed Publications

1. Luhar M. and H. Nepf.  2012.  From the blade scale to the reach scale: a characterization of aquatic vegetative drag.  To appear in Advances in Water Resources 35^th Anniversary Special Issue (Invited Paper).
2. Luhar M. and H. Nepf.  2011.  Flow induced reconfiguration of buoyant, flexible aquatic vegetation.  Limnology and Oceanography, 56(6):2003-2017.
3. Marcos*, J.R. Seymour*, M. Luhar*, W.M. Durham*, J.G. Mitchell, A. Macke, and R. Stocker*.  2011.  Microbial alignment in flow changes ocean light climate.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 108(10):3860-3864. (*authors contributed equally)
4. Luhar M., S. Coutu, E. Infantes, S. Fox, and H. Nepf.  2010.  Wave induced velocities inside a model seagrass bed.  Journal of Geophysical Research, 115, C12005.
5. Luhar M., J. Rominger, and H. Nepf.  2008.  Interaction between flow, transport and vegetation spatial structure.  Environmental Fluid Mechanics, 8:423-439. (update: as of March 7, 2012, this was most frequently downloaded article for this journal over a 90 day period)