MASNA Graduates Win Scholarship Competition and Enter Ph.D. Programs in the UK

Ekaterina Melianova and Artem Volgin were admitted to Ph.D. programs at the universities of Bristol and Manchester, beating the competition for a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

More than once, we have told about the achievements of our stellar pair – Ekaterina Melianova and Artem Volgin, graduates of the master's programme "Applied Statistics with Network Analysis." Ekaterina and Artem, in the second year of our program, took second place in the Data Science Survey Challenge and won the DS4G: Environmental Insights Explorer contest, which were held on the Kaggle platform. Less than six months later, they took second place and won$25,000 each in completely different international analytical competitions – CDP: Unlocking Climate Solutions, held on the Kaggle platform, and The COVID–19 Symptom Data Challenge.

And now Ekaterina Melianova and Artem Volgin are in our news again – the guys managed not only to enter the Ph.D. programme in the UK but also to get ahead of the competition for a scholarship! Ekaterina entered the programme "Advanced Quantitative Methods" (University of Bristol), and Artem – "Social Statistics" (University of Manchester). Both programmes are sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Still, each university is included in a different plan: for Bristol University, the competition for the fellowship was through the South West Doctoral Training Partnership, and for Manchester, the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership.

"We want to delve deeper into different (advanced) statistical methods and their application to real–world social problems, reflecting this in our Ph.D. research. In my work, I plan to study the effects of various government measures on population health in the UK. Artem, using network analysis tools, will simulate student transitions between schools in London to identify how this system of displacement works and find possible ways to improve it" (Ekaterina Melianova)

We congratulate Ekaterina and Artem on another success and wish them never to stray from their academic and professional development path!