Rana Cömertpay is Research Associate at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). Her role consists on the evaluation of development policies in Africa in the framework of a new Development Policy Impact Analysis Unit, hosted and managed by LISER, and operating in cooperation with JPal-Europe, LuxDev and the Directorate for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs). She is currently exploring the causal impact of vocational training for youth and female employment in Senegal.

She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg, from where she holds a Ph.D. in Economics. During her Ph.D., she visited the Institute of Economic and Social Research (IRES) at UCLouvain. 

Her research interests are in the fields of migration and development economics with a particular focus on forced displacement and conflict situations in developing countries. Rana's contributions so-far appeared in the Journal of Development Economics and World Bank's Policy Research Papers among others. 

In 2018, she has been successful in a big data challenge - Data for Refugees (D4R) - on mobile phone calls in Turkey and she has since been passionate about working with big data. In her research, she employs advanced methods in econometrics, also borrowing from other disciplines, notably tools from geography such as ArcGIS, to answer economically relevant questions. Her contribution relies on up-to-date, highly disaggregated, complex and novel datasets, such as CDRs (i.e. mobile phone data), satellite, climate and media event data (partly obtained by relying on web scraping), among others.