Research & Expertise

Rapidly changing approaches to the pursuit of scientific knowledge are making research more interdisciplinary in nature. Science and researchers are now more open to society, while student academic mobility among universities is encouraged. Maria Yudkevich, HSE Vice Rector, talks about these issues, explaining how HSE University promotes and expands its research activities and supports early-career researchers.

The outbreak of the pandemic posed some serious challenges to the world that required the concentration of many people’s efforts and the use of the latest technologies. This has led to powerful technological breakthroughs, particularly in medicine. HSE University researchers Leonid Grinin, Anton Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev published a paper in which they assessed the impact of COVID-19 on social development. The authors concluded that the pandemic will considerably accelerate humanity’s transition to a new stage of development, but can also cause significant social strain.

An international team of researchers including biologists from HSE University has developed a method that helps obtain information on changes in protein expression and properties during cells’ transition from one state to another. One of the most interesting transitions is the transformation of cells from undifferentiated stem cells to differentiated cells of various organs and tissues. The paper was published in Nature Communications.

Some children who don’t go to school and commit crimes manage to reintegrate into society by learning new mores and lifestyles. But others only appear to adapt, becoming ‘outsiders’ again the minute they leave the school grounds, going back to the same risky life on the streets. The two approaches offer youngsters very different opportunities in life. This IQ.HSE article, that draws on research by sociologist Irina Lisovskaya, explores how to help such youth integrate into society and learn to communicate with others.

The HSE School of Psychology has studied the psychological, social, and political factors behind Russians’ pro-environmental behaviour. It appears that women hold more pro-environmental attitudes than men, trust in the free market negatively affects sustainable consumption, and awareness of the benefits of pro-environmental actions better motivates people to sort waste than environmental concern or connectedness to nature. The study has been published by SSRN.

The award ceremony of the 2021 Student Research Paper Competition took place on February 8. The organisers congratulated the students and early career researchers and told them about the benefits of winning in the competition.

The laboratory will be led by Robert Sandlersky, a specialist in energy and mass transfer and the study of other properties of landscapes via satellite imagery and Senior Research Fellow at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The HSE News Service spoke to Robert about the laboratory’s future activities.

Why do people sometimes overestimate their knowledge—more often than not, those who are not well-versed in the subject at hand? Twenty years ago, two researchers studied this phenomenon and tried to explain it from a psychological point of view. This phenomenon is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect after the names of the researchers. According to a report presented at a seminar of the HSE Department of Applied Economics, this effect has a purely statistical explanation.

The HSE Centre for Student Academic Development has started accepting applications for the third ‘Research Initiative’ student team research project competition. Bachelor’s and master’s students from all HSE campuses are eligible to participate. The competition gives students an opportunity to not only take on research roles, but also to try their hand at working as academic managers and supervisors of a small research team. Registration will remain open until February 28.

Neurobiologists from HSE University and the RAS Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology proved that the human brain unconsciously distinguishes between even very similar sound signals during passive listening. The study was published in Neuropsychologia.