News

On February 8, we celebrated Russian Science Day. The recently released report entitled, ‘Russian Science in Figures’, compiled by HSE’s Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, details the current state of science funding, the percentage of the population in scientific jobs, and scientific research. Leonid Gokhberg, director of ISSEK and the first vice-rector of HSE, told us more about it.

On January 23, 2018, Roger Smith – Emeritus Reader in the History of Science at Lancaster University (UK) and Honorary Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow – delivered a lecture entitled ‘The History of the Senses’. The lecture contributed to the history course taught by Professor Irina Savelieva, Director of the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, for second year Master's students.

Inhabitants of Moscow and St Petersburg live significantly longer than people living in other regions of Russia, according to a recent study carried out by researchers at the Higher School of Economics.

Vera Pozzi, originally from Italy, received her PhD in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Milano in 2015. She recently started as a post-doc research fellow in the School of Philosophy (Faculty of Humanities), where she is studying contemporary Russian Orthodox thought. Vera spoke with the HSE News Service about her experience at HSE Moscow so far, her research interests, and what she is hoping to accomplish over the coming year.

Every summer since 2007, the Center for Institutional Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics has been organizing the annual Russian Summer School on Institutional Analysis (RSSIA). Students and researchers from around the world convene in Moscow to enjoy a whole week of lectures and consultations, presentations, discussions and networking, as well as the opportunity to be inspired by the experts.

Mass graves became a reality of the first decades of Soviet Russia: victims of the revolution, famine, epidemics, political repression, the Civil War and World War II were often buried in common rather than individual graves. Over the centuries, Russians had regarded such practice as unusual and rarely acceptable. Soviet power needed to change popular mentality and give a new meaning to mass burials for both ideological and political reasons. Svetlana Malysheva studied this phenomenon.

On January 15, HSE welcomed Stephen Kotkin, Professor of History at Princeton University and Associated Senior Research Fellow at HSE’s International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. Professor Kotkin spoke about his new book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1919-1941 (New York, 2017) to an audience of students, staff, fellow researchers and members of the general public.

Researchers from the Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA) at the Higher School of Economics have improved their way of analyzing ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with the use of mobile phones. The work has been carried out as part of the CRAYFIS experiment and the results were presented at the 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics.

Maria Sole Continiello Neri, a native of Rome, Italy, recently joined the Centre of Comparative Law at HSE as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. While at HSE, she will study Russian immigration law and practice against the backdrop of the European Court of Human Rights. She also plans to study law and ethics of the use of Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) during armed conflict.

Mirror symmetry is a relatively new field of mathematics which came into being in the 1990s. In 2017, HSE opened the International Laboratory for Mirror Symmetry and Automorphic Forms. The December conference, ‘Mirror Symmetry and Applications’, was a commemoration of its first year of operation.