faculty
Rana Jahani Assistant Professor of Game Development
Rana Jahani is a game designer, UX researcher, and educator with a strong background in both academia and industry. She served as an Adjunct Lecturer at Northeastern University, where she designed and taught courses in game design, level design, procedural content generation for games, and XR applications. With a focus on immersive storytelling, user experience, and technical prototyping, she mentored student teams through hands-on project development, fostering critical thinking and creativity.
Her industry experience includes working as a Level Designer at Baka Bros Entertainment, where she contributed to Chaos Kart, a published multiplayer racing game on Steam, using Unreal Engine. She has also developed a wide range of prototypes in Unity, including cross-platform, VR games, and escape rooms, and has worked across the full game development pipeline from ideation to user testing and iteration.
As a researcher at Northeastern’s GhostLab, Rana has led UX and playtesting efforts for VR and AR projects, applying both qualitative and quantitative methods to improve player engagement and learning outcomes. Her work has been recognized in publications presented at CHI and Cureus, focusing on extended reality learning environments and serious games.
Rana holds an MS in Game Science and Design from Northeastern University and a BS in Software Engineering. Her work has earned awards such as the Neurath Outstanding Social Relevance Award and a Graduate Scholarship from CAMD at Northeastern University.