News

One of the biggest headlines of recent days has been the announcement made by Pfizer, a U.S.-based company, and BioNTech, Germany, that BNT162b2, a COVID-19 vaccine they are developing, has proved to be 90% effective in its Phase 3 clinical trial. The news was met with big excitement all over the world. However, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is based on a new platform, which is still understudied. According to protocol, its trial will be complete only in 2022. IQ talked to Larisa Popovich, Director of the HSE Institute for Health Economics, about the differences between the U.S.-German and the Russian Sputnik V vaccines, and about the chances of beating COVID-19 with massive immunization in the upcoming months.

Experts at HSE University and other universities discussed what constitutes a university virtue and whether it is possible to assess scientific and scholarly accomplishments based solely on quantitative criteria. At the conference ‘University HR Policies: Managing Staff Involvement’, Aleksei Pleshkov, Director of the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities at HSE University, gave a talk entitled ‘In Search of Academic Ethics: Goodness, Virtues and Happiness’.

Vladislav Khvostov, a second-year student of the Doctoral School of Psychology at HSE University, was recognized with a Graduate Conference Award for Student Members from the Psychonomic Society. Every year a total of 20 graduate students in cognitive psychology receive this prestigious international award in psychology. HSE News Service spoke with Vladislav about the award, his interest in cognitive psychology and research.

Researchers from HSE University and Harvard have found that the grouping of multiple elements in a visual display does not affect the search speed for an element with a unique combination of features. The Guided Search theory predicted such results. The study is published in the Journal of Vision.

When partners are of the same religion, it helps to compensate for any differences in their values, while monocultural couples are more satisfied with their marriage.

On November 6, Dr. Klaus Boehnke, Deputy Director of the HSE Centre for Sociocultural Research, presented his report entitled ‘Does COVID-19 propel value change: A comparison of Germany and the United Kingdom?’ at the ‘Culture Matters’ research seminar. HSE News Service has talked to Dr. Boehnke about various aspects of the value changes and socio-economic consequences of the pandemic in Europe and Russia.

After collapsing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer demand has partly recovered in Russia. The lowest point in consumer confidence seems to be behind us, but we should not expect a noticeable recovery any time soon, according to HSE ISSEK Centre for Business Tendency Studies (CBTS). Based on a recent consumer survey in Russia, IQ compares consumer sentiments as we are entering the second wave of the pandemic with those reported at the start of its first wave.

This week, researchers from all over the world have gathered online for the 10^th annual International Academic Conference ‘Foresight and STI Policy’ at HSE University. One of the cross-cutting themes of the anniversary forum, which will be held from November 9 to 13, is lessons learned from the pandemic and the crisis’s effects in future scenarios.

HSE University’s new combined Master’s-PHD track programme received 212 applications from first-year master’s students this year. Of these, 45 students were admitted to the track to study at a combined total of 17 doctoral schools at HSE. The combined Master's-PhD track, which was launched just this year, provides a new form of support for students who study in state-funded slots and intend to pursue careers in academia.

Due to a longstanding lack of evidence-based information about freelancers, Andrey Shevchuk and Denis Strebkov, senior research fellows at the HSE Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, have endeavoured to dispel misconceptions about this growing class of workers. Though remote work has become particularly relevant during the pandemic, the researchers identify several trends that have determined the direction of the remote job market even before the coronavirus outbreak.