In October 2025, more than 200 international students began their studies on HSE University’s International Preparatory Year. After a month of rigorous in-class learning, they gathered for a more informal event—the Russian Speaking Club—where they met classmates from other groups. The HSE University News Service spoke with students, teachers, and administrators about the programme’s progress and expansion.

In October, Mikhail Simonov reaffirmed his title as the Russian ring racing champion in the premier TCR Russia class, becoming the youngest champion in the history of this category. The racing champion is a second-year student in the Master’s Programme in International Sports Management, Marketing, and Law at HSE University. In an interview with the HSE News Service, he shared his perspective on how to succeed both in professional sports and in academics.

Schola continues to introduce the winners of the International Academic Cooperation competition. Professor Andrey Vasenko, Deputy Head of the Scientific and Educational Laboratory of Quantum Nanoelectronics at HSE MIEM, speaks about the joint project between his laboratory and the Peking University research team—‘Engineering of highly efficient and stable perovskite solar cells.’

The world’s first annual software engineering olympiad for secondary school students—PROD—is expanding internationally. Schoolchildren in grades 8–11 from around the world are invited to participate. For the first time, the competition will be held in both Russian and English. The organisers of the International PROD Olympiad are Central University and T-Technologies Group, the parent company of T-Bank, in partnership with the HSE Faculty of Computer Science.

Denis Bodrov studies particle physics and works at one of the four electron–positron colliders in the world. In this interview with the HSE Young Scientists project, he talks about his efforts to go beyond the Standard Model, discusses tau leptons, and shares his affection for Moscow.

Researchers at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science have optimised the training method for generative flow neural networks to handle unstructured tasks, which could make the search for new drugs more efficient. The results of their work were presented at ICLR 2025, one of the world’s leading conferences on machine learning. The paper is available at Arxiv.org.

Maria Andreeva became interested in satellite engineering in Year 6. Two years ago, a satellite she helped develop was launched into space. This year, Maria entered HSE University to study on the Information Science and Computation Technology programme delivered by HSE MIEM. In an interview with the HSE News Service, the first-year student spoke about her passion for space and the opportunities she has found at the university.

Today, global linguistics is undergoing a ‘multilingual revolution.’ The era of English-language dominance in the cognitive sciences is drawing to a close as researchers turn their attention to the diversity of world languages. Moreover, multilingualism is shifting from an exotic phenomenon to the norm. The future of experimental linguistics was the focus of a recent discussion at HSE University.

A team of researchers, including scientists from HSE MIEM, has demonstrated that defects in a material can enhance, rather than hinder, superconductivity. This occurs through interaction between defective and cleaner regions, which creates a 'quantum glue'—a component that binds superconducting regions into a network. This mechanism could aid in developing superconductors that operate at higher temperatures. The study has been published in Communications Physics.