Research & Expertise news at HSE University

A public council for the independent evaluation of the quality of education conditions has been created at the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. Alexander Milkus, Head of the HSE Laboratory for Educational and Youth Journalism, has been unanimously elected as its chair.

HSE researchers have shown that a child’s phonological abilities (including sensitivity to the sound composition of speech and the ability to identify individual sounds and syllables) are connected with mathematical aptitude in elementary school. However, the relationship between sound speech sensitivity and the development of mathematics varies depending on the socio-economic status of the child’s family.

By 2025, a significant number of marketing experts will lose their jobs to computer programmes that can perform their jobs for them. But those who learn to work with big data and use neurosemantic and social techonology will be able to survive, says Tatyana Komissarova, Dean of HSE’s Higher School of Marketing and Business Development.

Scientists at the Higher School of Economics, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IBCh RAS), and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center created a genetic model that helps to understand how the body restrains autoimmune and oncological diseases. The researchers published their results in Nature Immunology.

Established in Russia under Peter the Great and bestowed upon Catherine I who became its supreme head, the Order of Saint Catherine, or the ‘Order of Liberation’ (‘Orden osvobozhdeniia’), was the first order in Russia to be awarded to women. This small sliver of Petrine era history, as Professor Igor Fedyukin demonstrates in his new research, reveals the monarch’s wife’ serious political ambitions. Professor Fedyukin discusses how the history of the ‘ladies’ order’ reflects the former mistress’s plans to elevate her status and change the line of succession to the throne in her children’s favor.

Inscriptions, symbols and shapes of tombstones and cemetery layouts carry important messages about society, its values and hierarchies. Research by HSE scholar Svetlana Malysheva reveals some of the things Soviet cemeteries can tell us about the USSR and its people.

Sound artist Robert Elias Stokowy of Berlin and Yulia Chernenko,lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Communications, Media, and Design, have initiated a joint German-Russian artistic research project entitled, ‘Phenomenology of Darkness’.

Speaking at the Professor’s Forum on February 7, Yaroslav Kuzminov, Rector of the Higher School of Economics, noted that science in Russia, especially in Russian universities, is underfunded, and suggested several steps to support Russian researchers and help them reach their full potential.