Research & Expertise

On February 2-3, 2017 the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg hosted the International Student Research Conference. The campus became a meeting point for young researchers and professors from Belarus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Norway, Portugal, Russia, the UK, and Ukraine.  For two days, participants attended lectures delivered by keynote speakers, presented posters and discussed issues of social informatics, applied data analysis, regional planning and development, sustainable tourism and development, modern Asia, finance, economic growth, logistics, usable pasts and political science. Sessions covered a wide variety of research interests.

The belief that the non-profit sector is mainly supported by private donations is nothing but a myth. According to Natalia Ivanova's study Foreign Experience of Government's Impact on Philanthropy and Its Applicability in Russia, government support accounts for a substantial part of charity budgets.

The article ‘Regime Type and Political Destabilization in a Cross-National Perspective: A Re-Analysis’ by Andrey Korotayev, Professor at HSE School of Political Science, co-authored by Julia Zinkina (HSE), Elena Slinko (Rossiya Segodnya) and Stanislav Bilyuga (MSU) was published in the journal ‘Cross-Cultural Research’.

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have shown how the level of perinatal testosterone, the sex hormone, impacts a person’s earnings in life. Prior research confirms that many skills and successes are linked to the widely known 2D:4D ratio, also knows as the digit ratio. This is the ratio of the index and ring fingers, and it is considered a reflection of the level of perinatal testosterone, the male hormone of the mother that acts on the development of the offspring during pregnancy.

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.