Research & Expertise news at HSE University

How can a small Russian research group become a world-famous scientific centre in less than a decade? A special edition of the Frontiers in Psychologyjournal devoted to increasing public awareness of neuroscience features an article about the HSE University Center for Language and Brain, including the successes and challenges of its early years.

Russian and international researchers should intensify their joint efforts to analyze the changes in higher education over the past year and a half.    Speaking at a round table held in the International Multimedia Centre of the Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) news agency, HSE Rector Nikita Anisimov suggested that this work be done as part of the International Observatory for Higher Education Transformations—a global research programme launched by HSE University and the Polytechnic University of Milan.

A group of scientists from Hungary, Russia and Finland have developed a system capable of selecting cancer cells of a specific shape and size—spheroids. SpheroidPicker, the first AI device of its kind, enables a more standardized approach to working with tumour samples. The results of the research have been published in the journal Scientific Reports. One of researchers who worked on the project is Nikita Moshkov, Junior Research Fellow of the Laboratory on AI for Computational Biology.

The Fourth ICEF Conference on Applied Economics will present the studies conducted by scholars at the universities across the world, that relate to education. We talked with Fabian Slonimczyk, an Associate Professor at ICEF and the conference organizing committee member, to learn more about the highlights of this year’s conference.

Although many studies point to highly negative trends in returns to education in Russia, the situation actually appears to be stable and without any signs of overinvestment in human capital. This is the conclusion of Rostislav Kapeliushnikov, Deputy Director of the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies and Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The results of his research are presented in the article ‘Returns to Education in Russia: Nowhere Below?’ published in the 8^th issue of the Voprosy Ekonomiky journal.

This summer, the HSE Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences was reorganized to become the HSE Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Oleg Budnitskii, Doctor of Historical Sciences, head of the Centre and director of the Institute, talked to the HSE News Service about the new division.

Master’s programmes are gaining popularity in Russia. The number of master’s graduates now stands at 185,000 — more than three times the 2013 figure. In 2020, one fifth of admissions to Russian universities were for master’s programmes.

The Journal of Alloys and Compounds has published an article coauthored by the Institute of Solid State Chemistry and Mechanochemistry (the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences), the Donostia International Physics Centre, and the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics on the characteristics of cubic double perovskite oxides. To date, experimental measurements of the minerals’ characteristics have not corresponded to the results of theoretical modelling. The work marks the first time that researchers have set themselves the task of explaining this disparity. The data obtained will allow researchers to improve low-temperature fuel cell technologies—one of the main alternatives to current sources of electricity.