Rana is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Education, Communication & Society (ECS) and one of the co-investigators of the ESRC-funded study Young Lives, Young Futures.

Rana’s research focuses on understanding young people’s experiences of inequalities and the social, place-based and institutional factors that produce such inequalities. She uses youth-centred participatory methodologies that aim to amplify youth voices in research and policymaking.

Her PhD project investigated the impact of social housing regeneration on the wellbeing of young people from lower-income backgrounds in London. She used the capability approach and participatory methods to foreground teenagers’ experiences of restructuring their social housing estates into mixed-income communities.

Rana first joined ECS as an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in 2022. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics' Social Policy Department, after which she was a research fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab. Previously, she also worked in international research and development contexts.

Research interests

• Social policy, inequalities and youth wellbeing
• Place- and community-based effects
• Youth participation in research and policy