News

Frank Fisher, Associate Professor in the School of Linguistics, moved to HSE in 2016, having previously worked at Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities. With his significant experience in the field, Frank instantly gave boost to digital humanities research at HSE. He became the co-founder of the Centre for Digital Humanities at HSE and is leading a new Junior Research Group on digital literary research. In January Frank became a co-director of DARIAH, a pan-European research infrastructure, with hopes to leverage his involvement there to the benefit of research projects at HSE.

Navid Hassanpour, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences (School of Political Science) at the Higher School of Economics, is the author of ‘Leading from the Periphery and Network Collective Action’ published by Cambridge University Press in December 2016. He recently spoke with the HSE News Service about his current course at HSE, expansion of the Master’s programme in Applied Political Science, and his plans for upcoming research.

More than half (51%) of Russians did not make savings before the current economic crisis and are not making any today. As of the end of 2016, 70% of Russians did not have any outstanding loans or debts. Researchers of the HSE Institute for Social Policy (ISP) examined Russians' borrowing and saving behaviour in the ‘Monitoring of Russian Population in 2016: Revenues, Expenditures and Social Well-being’.

A special session entitled ‘Views on European regions in the history of Slavic studies’ has been included in the official programme of the 16th International Congress of Slavists at the International Committee of Slavists’ extended presidium meeting. This special session has been initiated and will be chaired by Leonid Gorizontov. Historians and philologists from Russia, Poland, Slovakia, Italy, and Germany will speak at the session.

From January 21 – 22, 2017, an international seminar ‘The Syrian and Middle East Regional Order: Russian, Syrian, and Turkish Perspectives’ took place in St. Petersburg and involved Russian, Turkish, and Syrian experts on the Middle East. The event was organized by the HSE Laboratory for Monitoring the Risks of Socio-Political Destabilization and the Department of Asian and African Studies at HSE in St. Petersburg, together with two leading Middle Eastern research centers: the OMRAN Center for Strategic Studies in Istanbul and the Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies (ORSAM) in Ankara. This was the second time the three countries’ experts had met in this format, since last year’s meeting in Istanbul.

Structure and Dynamics of α-hairpinin Peptide Tk-hefu2 in Water: Computer Simulations, an article in which HSE researchers make discoveries relevant to a variety of fields, including mathematics, information science, physics, and biology, opens up new opportunities for medicines to arise that regulate the function of potassium channels that ensure the vital functioning of human cells.

Researchers from the HSE Institute of Education have adapted and begun using an assessment tool for comparing the knowledge and skills of children starting school. Their first results were obtained from a sample of children starting school in Russia and the UK.

For perfectionists, sleep quality is often far from perfect. However, perfectionism per se seems to be just part of the story; another important factor is a perfectionists' tendency to experience frequent symptoms of anxiety, sometimes for relatively minor reasons. These are the findings made by a team of Russian and UK sleep researchers, published in the January 2017 issue of Personality and Individual Differences journal.

2016 marked 125 years since the birth of Osip Mandelstam. Pavel Polian (Nerler), Director of the Mandelstam Centre, summarized the results of its years’ work

This issue Computer Science: History of Emerging Discipline is dedicated to contemporary computer science education in Russia.