A total of 56 early-career researchers will join HSE University in Moscow and St Petersburg in the 2022/2023 academic year as part of the university’s Russian Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme. Some are participating in the programme for the first time, while others are returning for their second year. HSE University in Moscow has welcomed 29 new researchers to its departments.

In 2022, a HSE University department joined the ranks of UNESCO Futures Literacy Chairs. This builds on the work of the ISSEK International Research and Educational Foresight Centre, and the activity of the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre. Professor Alexander Sokolov, head of the new department, Director of the International Research and Educational Foresight Centre, and Deputy Director of HSE ISSEK, spoke about the establishment, aims and objectives of the UNESCO Chair on Future Studies.

How do I find my way between numerous HSE campuses? How will I survive if I don’t speak any Russian? What is a polite way of addressing my professors? These are only a few of the questions international students have when they come to study at HSE University. At the beginning of the new academic year, HSE University is running a series of Orientation Sessions for new international students to address these questions and help them settle into their life in Moscow.

The summer school 'Space in/for Environmental Humanities: Reconsidering the Global through Studying Peripheries' explored the impact of human activity on natural environments and their transformation. It was co-organised by the School of Environmental and Social Studies (Anthroposchool) at the University of Tyumen (TSU) and the HSE Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI), with support from the Mirror Labs programme of HSE University.

The cognitome is a representation of the brain as a neuronal hypernetwork structure. The dynamics of this structure reflect the functioning of consciousness. In early September, the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science hosted the international conference Computer Methods of Cognitome Analysis. The event was organised by the International Laboratory of Algebraic Topology and Its Applications at the faculty.

An international team of scientists from the UK, Spain, Denmark and Russia (including researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience) conducted an experiment demonstrating that people automatically integrate extralinguistic information into grammatical processing during verbal communication. The study findings were published in the Scientific Reports Journal.