In January, HSE University hosted the third GameDevFest—a computer game festival organised by the School of Software Engineering and the project group ‘Computer Game Software Engineering—PIKI’ with the participation of the Vintorog game studio. Guests had the opportunity to play a variety of video games, including demo versions created by FCS students and other aspiring game designers.

On March 1, 2026, HSE University will hold its traditional event for prospective bachelor’s and specialist degree applicants and their parents—the University-Wide Open Day. Here is what to expect this year.

An international team, including researchers from HSE University, has created the first comprehensive map of quadruplexes—unstable DNA structures involved in gene regulation. In healthy tissues, quadruplexes regulate tissue-specific genes, whereas in cancerous tissues they influence genes responsible for cell growth and division. These findings may contribute to the development of new anticancer drugs that target quadruplexes. 

The Sino-Russian Association of Fundamental Sciences has officially begun its work in China. It brings together research centres in mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, and Earth sciences, with participation from HSE University scholars. During the launch conference, the Sino-Russian Mathematics Series project was also presented; it envisages the publication of 100 textbooks and monographs over the next ten years.

Mathematician Ivan Remizov from HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod and the RAS Institute for Information Transmission Problems has made a conceptual breakthrough in the theory of differential equations. He has derived a universal formula for solving problems that had been considered unsolvable in quadratures for more than 190 years.

On February 4–5, 2026, the HSE BRICS Competition Centre, together with the Egyptian Competition Authority, held a meeting of the BRICS Working Group for the Research of Competition Issues in Food Markets in Cairo. The antimonopoly authorities agreed to launch a joint analysis of the grain sector to be conducted with the support of the BRICS Competition Centre.

Every year, in response to IT industry demands, the Higher School of Economics Faculty of Computer Science launches new educational programmes while updating existing ones. In 2026, the faculty introduced Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes in robotics for the first time.

Valeria Vinogradova, a researcher at HSE University, together with British colleagues, studied how language proficiency affects cognitive processing in deaf adults. The study showed that higher language proficiency—regardless of whether the language is signed or spoken—is associated with higher activity and stronger functional connectivity within the brain network responsible for cognitive task performance. The findings have been published in Cerebral Cortex.

In the 1970s–80s, the Soviet Union made an unexpected discovery: in a society built on collectivist ideals, loneliness had become a significant social problem. In his study, Mikhail Kulagin, a postgraduate researcher at the HSE Faculty of Humanities, shows that the state not only acknowledged this paradox but also attempted to solve it through special ‘social technologies’ —including dating clubs, newspaper personal advertisements, and even early computer matchmaking systems.