Alessandro Locatelli, from Italy, is a third-year student of the Bachelor's in Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication at the HSE School of Foreign Languages. In his interview with the HSE News Service, he reflects on why it’s important to integrate a cultural dimension into language learning, what makes HSE lecturers special, and how curiosity motivated his decision to study in Russia.

HSE University and the Russia Renewable Energy Development Association (RREDA) have signed a partnership and information cooperation agreement to support Renewable Energy of the Planet—2026, a national competition with international participation for students and early-career researchers. Applications are open on the competition's website until September 20, 2026.

Researchers from the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences have shown that the accuracy of birth rate forecasts for Russia can be improved by almost 50% by incorporating the dynamics of online search queries related to pregnancy and childbirth into forecasting models. In the best-performing models, the forecasting error fell from 4.6% to 3.2%. The findings have been published in Populations and Economics.

Lin Meiran, an exchange student, spent the autumn semester at HSE University–St Petersburg. She took courses on game theory, artificial intelligence, and generative models and explored the cultural side of the city and made new friends. Read on to find out why HSE University–St Petersburg is a great destination for exchange students.

Every year, the master's programmes at the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (HSE MIEM) attract a large number of students from Africa and the Middle East. Each of them follows a unique path towards becoming an engineering professional. Ahead of receiving their degrees, several graduates shared their personal stories about how they chose their profession and what they learned during their time at HSE.

Around one-third of Russians (31.3%) rarely eat out or buy ready-made meals. The core group of active consumers—those who eat out or purchase prepared food almost every day or several times a week—accounts for only about 9% of the population. These are the findings of a study conducted by the HSE Institute for Social Policy. According to the researchers eating out is no longer a marker of high social status in Russia.

Elizaveta Fomina, second-year student of the Bachelor's programme 'Political Science and World Politics,' spent the autumn semester at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. Read on to find out why you should choose a mobility programme in Asia and how studying abroad helps to develop independence and build global plans.

The Society for Social Choice and Welfare has granted the Young Scholar Paper Award to Angelina Iudina, doctoral student and lecturer at the Department of Mathematics of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences and Junior Research Fellow at the HSE International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis. The scientists highlighted her article devoted to solving the problem of choosing the best alternatives based on the results of pairwise comparisons.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from HSE University–St Petersburg, has developed microlasers that emit deep-ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 255 nanometres. The devices operate at room temperature, and the smallest of them measures just two micrometres in diameter—roughly the size of a bacterium. These microlasers could be used in sensors, spectroscopic systems, photonic chips, and communication devices. The paper has been published in Optics & Laser Technology.