Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The more a student engages with various activities on campus, the higher their odds of success post-graduation. According to a study by HSE researchers, not only academic but also research and social engagement, such as participation in student organisations and events, can be linked to the development of critical thinking skills which are essential for general wellbeing as well as career advancement.

In Russia, women earn about 70% of what men earn in wages. In the academic sector, this gap is smaller. However, although women make up a majority at universities, wage gaps between the two genders still persist. To find out why this is the case, IQ.HSE spoke with Victor Rudakov, Research Fellow at the Institute of Institutional Studies.

During the first half of the twentieth century—a period marred by wars, revolutions, and social upheaval—Europe almost destroyed itself twice. Despite the apparent closeness of the events of this period and the copious studies that they have inspired, many questions still remain unanswered, and the causes and interrelationships between the events remain unclear. Laura Pettinaroli, a researcher at the Catholic University of Paris, has been conducting research in the archives of the Vatican, Italy, France, Belgium and Russia for more than ten years in order to shed more light on the relationship between the Vatican and Russia during this period.

Reproductive behavior is modernizing at different rates in post-Soviet countries. Things are changing faster in Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine, where, over the last fifteen years, the average maternity age has increased and the contribution of women in their thirties to their countries’ birthrates has grown. Meanwhile, old reproductive patterns persist in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where firstborns are usually born to parents under 30, demographers Vladimir Kozlov and Konstantin Kazenin note in a paper delivered at HSE’s XX April International Academic Conference.

A new supercomputer, which has been recently set up at MIEM, will allow the university to carry out high quality research in deep learning and mathematical modeling. The computer was ranked sixth in the April Top-50 ranking of supercomputers in Russia.

Researchers from HSE University and York University have become the first to analyse the results of 82 functional neuroimaging studies on working memory mechanisms in different adult age groups. The meta-analyses showed that across studies the agreement of various areas of the prefrontal cortex decreases with ageing, suggesting reorganization of brain function during healthy aging. The results have been published in the paper ‘Meta-analyses of the n-back working memory task: fMRI evidence of age-related changes in prefrontal cortex involvement across the adult lifespan’.

More than half of school graduates in medium-sized Russian cities will change their place of residence either forever or at least for a long time. According a report on internal migration presented by HSE demographers at the XX April International Academic Conference, these people are lost to their cities.

At the general meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), held on April 23, research by Alexander Kostinskiy, Vladimir Rakov and Mikhail Andreev conducted in collaboration with their colleagues from academic institutes on the modeling and development of lightning was acknowledged as one of the most significant Russian scientific achievement in 2018.