Lama Hamandi

(she/her/hers)

Associate Teaching Professor

  • Computer science education
  • Gamification
  • Adaptive learning
  • Machine learning

Lama Hamandi’s primary goal in designing educational games is to improve equity in teaching and assessments, by blending educational content with dynamic and engaging gameplay. The “Gamification of Algorithms” is a learning and assessment game/tool that supports all students, particularly those who may struggle with traditional instruction and assessment methods.

Current projects

  • Real-time exam emotion pecognition: A system that uses multimodal analysis of facial expressions and physiological signals to detect and classify a student’s emotions like stress or confusion during an exam.
  • Personalized learning through adaptive gamification:  An educational game that adapts the learning path of each student according to their need, emotion and performance.
  • PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ohio State University 
  • MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ohio State University 
  • BS in Electrical Engineering, American University of Beirut

Lama Hamandi is an associate teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley. As the course lead for “Algorithms” across the Northeastern network, she teaches a variety of graduate courses, including Algorithms, Data Structures, Computer Networking, Computer Systems, and Parallel Data Processing.

A member of the IEEE and ACM, Hamandi is a passionate advocate for the gamification of computing education, and she supervises students in developing interactive games for learning algorithms.

A native of Beirut, Lebanon, Hamandi joined Northeastern in 2021, bringing with her a background that spans topics from electrical systems to advanced programming. Her global teaching experience includes roles at the American University of Beirut and King Saud University; her research, published in leading journals and conferences, has covered parallel processing, NLP, machine learning, and, more recently, innovations in computing education. Outside of her academic life, she enjoys hiking and exploring nature.