Research & Expertise News at HSE University

You cannot study spoken dialects from books. Instead, you need to go to a village, seek out its elders, and earn the trust of local residents before you can record hours of spontaneous stories. This is how Natalia Muravleva, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, conducts her research. Her internship in Serbia continued her long-standing study of dialects spoken by Macedonian settlers. In this interview, she discusses how diaspora cultural centres help researchers reach informants, why native speakers need to be interviewed only in their own language (otherwise, as she puts it, they may 'break'), and how a single field season helped her finalise her monograph. She also shares warm memories of autumn in Belgrade and of colleagues with whom grammar can be discussed in three languages at once.

Would you like to know whether a speaker’s trembling voice or an accidental gesture can give them away? At HSE University in Nizhny Novgorod, researchers are developing an algorithm that analyses speech, facial expressions, and gestures, and determines whether information is truthful with 92% accuracy. The project has applications ranging from forensic examination and bank recruitment to fundamental research. Anna Khomenko, head of the research group and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Brain at the HSE Faculty of Humanities in Nizhny Novgorod, explains how students and researchers are working together to create a corpus of video recordings, train a classifier, and prepare to introduce computer vision technology.

Researchers at HSE University employed a new method to model hypoxia in placental cells during pregnancies complicated by preeclampsia and identified molecular markers of tissue hypoxia. Since hypoxia is one of the key mechanisms underlying preeclampsia, these findings are important for a more accurate and timely diagnosis of the disease and for the development of effective treatment methods. The paper has been published in Placenta.

Taking part in the Student Research Paper Competition (SRPC) gives you an opportunity to present your research to experts, receive an independent assessment, and determine the future direction of your work. The competition is open to students graduating in 2026 not only from HSE University but from universities in Russia and abroad. Papers may be submitted in Russian and English, and in some fields also in French, German, and Spanish.

Russian neurophysiologists, including researchers from HSE University, have demonstrated the feasibility of using event-related fields (ERFs) to study brain activity during natural speech perception. The researchers showed that this approach can be applied not only to individual words but also to continuous speech. Their findings indicate that words whose meanings differ significantly from the preceding context require longer processing times. The study also reveals that the brain processes function words in two stages: first, it identifies their grammatical role and then uses this information to predict the next word. The study has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

The Eastern Economic Forum, currently taking place in Vladivostok, is addressing a wide range of issues, from the development of the Russian Far East and the Arctic to artificial intelligence. HSE University researchers took part in discussions, including those focused on attracting international professionals to Russia. Bilateral cooperation agreements were also signed.

Researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have presented RusLan-M, an open multimedia corpus that makes it possible to trace the development of early child speech in Russian from first words to the emergence of complex grammatical constructions. The database contains around 41 hours of video recordings and more than 35,000 child utterances. The new resource will help researchers study more precisely how children acquire Russian and, in the longer term, develop more reliable tools for assessing speech development. The study has been published in Language Resources and Evaluation.

The winners of the Young Mathematicians of Russia Award were announced at the 6th Conference of Russia’s Mathematical Centres, held in Kazan in late August 2026. Four of the nine award recipients are graduates of the HSE Faculty of Mathematics: Associate Professor Alexander Kalmynin, PhD students Alexander Zaitsev and Petr Kucheryavyy, and researcher Dmitry Pirozhkov.