News

Maria Belousova, an applicant from Uzbekistan, will become a first-year student at HSE University in autumn 2021. She will study at the HSE University Moscow campus in the School of Foreign Languages. The  News Service asked Maria why she chose HSE University, why she was interested in her chosen educational programme and how difficult it was to apply for University remotely.

The decision to establish the Advisory Board was made during a meeting between the Investment Club of Business Russia (‘Delovaya Rossiya’, an all-Russia public organization), and the HSE University Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, which launched a new Master’s Programme in Bioeconomics last year. The Advisory Board will include leading researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors working in the fields of biotechnology, environmental studies, and sustainable development. Sergey Nedoroslev, Business Russia Co-Chair, and Alexander Tonevitsky, Dean of the Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology at HSE University, will also serve as board members.

As the pandemic continues and working from home becomes the norm in some industries, professionals who once left to work in other countries are beginning to return home. Researchers from HSE University, the Catholic University of Louvain and the University of Lille have found out how strong this movement could be and what economic, social and political implications it might bring. The preprint of the study was published in the GLO Discussion Papers.

Starting September 1, 2021, HSE University-Moscow is introducing new safety policies on campus to prevent the spread of COVID-19. They apply to students over 18 years old who have not had COVID during the last six months, have not been vaccinated (with a Russian or a foreign vaccine), nor have a medical exemption from vaccination. Free vaccination will be available on campus to all arriving students.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. The event recedes ever further into the past, but the legacy of the trauma it caused endures. That stress produced trauma, and the trauma became part of Russia’s collective memory. Sociologists Yulia Belova, Margarita Muravitskaya and Nadezhda Melnikova of HSE’s Institute for Applied Political Research and Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology researched what this means for people who lived in the radioactively contaminated zone around the reactor and why the collective memory of the accident might disappear.

The ratios between the lengths of the second and fourth fingers, known as the 2D:4D ratio, are different in males and females, which is often explained by levels of androgens and oestrogens. However, an alternative theory states that men have bigger body parts, including fingers, which impacts the 2D:4D ratio. A research team including HSE University scholars refuted this hypothesis by collecting data on finger length from 7,500 people. The results of the study were published in Scientific Reports.

The winners of the third annual Ilya Segalovich Award were recently announced in Moscow. Established by Yandex, the award promotes the scientific endeavours of young researchers from Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in the field of Computer Science. Among this year’s winners were three HSE students, including Alexander Grishin, a Doctoral student of the Big Data and Information Retrieval School of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science. Alexander spoke to us about his work, research challenges, and why he was surprised to receive the award.

Enrolment is underway for the HSE Institute of Education’s new Master's programme, Science of Learning and Assessment, which was developed at the intersection of developmental science, advanced methods of neuroscience and psychometrics, and the theory and practice of testing and measurement. Students will learn to assess human development and adjust the learning process, relying on evidence-based approaches of neuroscience and current concepts of measuring skills, personality characteristics, competencies, and other complex constructs.