Tag "research projects"

The HSE Working Group “Russia Strategic Studies” in partnership with the IMEMO’s Center for International Security has conducted a joint seminar “The Role of Strategic Stability in Russian Foreign Policy”.

The start of a new academic year is an excellent time to plan the next steps in your academic career. On September 1, HSE University announced the start of its annual Student Research Paper Competition (SRPC-2022). Participation is open to students of Russian and international universities and to 2022 graduates. Last year, a total of 2,196 papers were submitted to the SRPC, of which 435 were from external participants.

In March 2021 the HSE University and Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) were awarded an institutional partnership grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to foster cooperation between these two institutions and to involve in it a broader group of younger fellows and doctoral students. On May 27th this project will start with a digital workshop "Varieties of Populism in East and West" (deadline for submission is April 23rd; for more info about the workshop see the link at the end of the news). We interviewed Professor Dr. Katharina Bluhm, director of the Institute for East European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, about the goals of this project and prospects of cooperation between the HSE University and the FUB.

At the recent seminar of the HSE International Laboratory for Social Integration Research, Isaac Olumayowa Oni, HSE doctoral student and lab research assistant, spoke about African migration to Russia. In an interview with HSE News Service, Isaac discussed his research and talked about what it’s like to study at HSE and live in Moscow.

Researchers at the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have shown experimentally that economic activity can actively change the brain. Signals that predict regular financial losses evoke plastic changes in the cortex. Therefore, these signals are processed by the brain more meticulously, which helps to identify such situations more accurately. The article was published in Scientific Reports.

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.

Several studies have indicated that schizophrenic patients are likely to show high levels of nicotine dependence. Scientists from HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Institut Pasteur, the CNRS, Inserm and the ENS employed a mouse model to elucidate how nicotine influences cells in the prefrontal cortex. They visualized how nicotine has a direct impact on the restoration of normal activity in nerve cells (neurons) involved in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. These findings were published in a paper that appeared in the journal Nature Medicine.

People with sleep disorders tend to misperceive their own appearance.

On March 15 Alena A. Khaptsova (Junior Research Fellow of International laboratory for Socio-Cultural Research, lecturer of School of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, HSE) took part in the «Culture matters» research seminar with the report on "Russian multiculturalism in the media: the technique of content analysis of the news".

Women who have moved to another part of the country tend to have higher fertility than those who stay in the same community all their lives. Relocation often improves a woman's life circumstances and broadens her choice of marriage partner, thus supporting her reproductive intentions, according to Svetlana Biryukova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Center for Studies of Income and Living Standards, and Alla Tyndik, Leading Research Fellow at the RANEPA.

On January 29, Thomas Espy, a student in the Population and Development Master’s programme at HSE, presented a report entitled ‘Mapping Xenophobia in Russia’. During his presentation, he highlighted his paper’s linear analysis of xenophobic attacks in the Russian Federation and a network analysis focusing on nationalist groups, as well as recommended areas of focus for Russian policymakers.

The Russian family has been becoming more demographically heterogeneous over recent years. Some of the families follow the trend of having many children: women more often give birth to a third and fourth child, and the gap between births is decreasing, which makes the evolution of the family faster. At the same time, younger generations are inclined to postpone marriage and having their first child, which leads either to later motherhood or to childlessness. This means that two opposite trends are developing; along with the growing share of ‘Western-type’ families, with postponed parenthood and fewer children, there is a revival of the traditional family with more children, Sergey Zakharov, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Demography, reported.

On October 9, the Public Policy Department presented a new book entitled ‘Policy impact of civil society in BRICS countries: best practices influencing policy-making’, which was published by HSE with support from Oxfam under the EU funded project ‘Empowering CSO Networks in an Unequal Multi-Polar World’.

The lower a person's resilience, the greater their alienation from themself, other people, and society. In turn, self-alienation and a lack of personal relationships can cause one to approve of military action as a solution to international conflicts, according to Olga Gulevich, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Psychology, and Andrey Nevruyev, postgraduate student of the same department.

Ambiguous attitudes held by the heirs of Russian moguls may affect the future of the country's big businesses. On one hand, the children of wealthy Russian business owners have an excellent headstart – they are well-educated and generally share their parents' values. Yet on the other hand, they are not likely to become selfless workaholics. Instead, they tend to be more hedonistic than their parents and less inclined to devote their entire life to building the family business. Most Russian business heirs expect to retire early and switch to hobbies, recreation and entertainment in their mid-life. Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, professor of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, is the first Russian researcher to study the mindsets of heirs of biggest Russian fortunes.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, virtually none of the post-communist countries have attained the level of socioeconomic development characteristic of advanced democracies. Likewise, none of the post-communist countries have emerged as successful autocracies with high-quality public institutions, such as those found in Singapore or Oman. Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, and Mikhail Mironyuk, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Political Science, examine possible reasons why it is so.

Over the past three years, the business climate in Russia has improved for companies with a long planning horizon and for those receiving government support. State-owned companies, however, have been worse off after losing their privileges and facing a level playing field, according to Andrei Yakovlev, director of the HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, Irina Levina, research fellow at the same Institute, and Anastasia Kazun, postgraduate student at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.

It is increasingly common for scientists to engage the general public in dialogue and involve people in research rather than communicating with them in a haughty or condescending manner. We are witnessing the hybridization of research institutes: researchers are more actively collaborating with the media, civil society, and the customers for research, HSE Associate Professor Roman Abramov and Senior Lecturer at the Department for the Analysis of Social Institutions Andrei Kozhanov noted in an article.

Encouraging entrepreneurship, providing social support services and helping people find jobs are all part of a new ‘social contract’ programme introduced across Russia to assist poor families in becoming financially self-sufficient. Using formal contracts to encourage low-income people to engage in economic activity is proving to be more effective than welfare handouts, according to researchers of the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards.

Over the past two decades, the average life expectancy in Russia has increased by 2.3 years for women and 1.4 years for men, according to a recently published paper based on the WHO's Global Burden of Disease (GBD) assessment – a major epidemiological study by a group of international experts, including Vasily Vlassov, Professor of the HSE Department of Health Care Administration and Economy.