Lidia Prokofieva and Alexei Starobinsky Honored with French Academic Palm Award
Lead analyst at the HSE’s Institute of Social Policy Lidia Prokofieva and HSE Professor at the Faculty of Physics Alexei Starobinsky have been honored by the French government for their contribution to science and education.
The Order of Academic Palms has existed in its current format since 1955, but was originally founded in the early 19th century by Napoleon, when it was awarded to leading professors at Paris University. Today it honors those who have made a significant contribution to the development of French science, academia, and education, and to strengthen academic ties with other countries. Over the years, it has been awarded to a number of people from HSE, including: Yaroslav Kuzminov, Lev Jakobson, Anatoly Vishnevsky, Andrey Klimenko, Irina Maltseva, and Andrei Sobolevski.
Lidia Prokofieva, an economist and statistician by education, worked for a long time with the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, later the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Socio-Economic Studies of the Population. Since 2013, she has been leading analyst at HSE’s Institute of Social Policy. She has written and co-authored a host of Russo-French research into poverty and family policy.
She was presented with the award during the France-Russia round-table ‘Services for Senior Citizens with Limited Abilities in France’, organized jointly by the HSE and the Embassy of the Republic of France in Russia.
Alexei Starobinsky, a leading specialist in gravitational theory, cosmology, and relativistic astrophysics, is a member of the Academies of Sciences in a number of countries, including Russia, Germany, Norway and the United States. At HSE he teaches at the recently established Faculty of Physics, and for a long time has conducted research at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ L.D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is actively involved in collaboration with international researchers, including in France.
We congratulate our colleagues.