Welcome Aboard: Post-Doc Researchers

Each year HSE hires post-doctoral researchers, accepting applications from all over the world, and they join various laboratories and centres. Some of them kindly provided additional information about their research interests and background, and The HSE Look continues the tradition of introducing HSE’s new international faculty and researchers.

The Faculty of Mathematics

Takanori Ayano is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Mathematics and holds PhD of Osaka University (2016). He studies the theory of the sigma function and Abelian function. The sigma function is a multivariate analytic function, which is constructed from some geometric data of an algebraic curve. Currently he is studying the inversion problem of algebraic integrals and the vanishing of the sigma function for a certain algebraic curve called telescopic curve.

The Faculty of Mathematics has four more post-doctoral Research Fellows this year: Mikhail Alfimov (Candidate of Sciences, The Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ange Bigeni (PhD of Université Lyon 1), Ash Lightfoot (PhD of Indiana University), and Andrew Staal (PhD of Queen’s University).

The Centre for Cognition and Decision Making

Tiziana Pedale is a Research Fellow at the Centre and holds PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Science at "Sapienza" University of Rome (Italy). Her research interest is focused on the behavioral and neural correlates involved in the interaction between emotion and other high-level cognitive functions, such as attention and memory. At HSE she would like to expand her research focus on the effect of emotion and mood induction on economic decision making and risk taking.

Denis Volk is a Research Fellow at the Centre, with five years of postdoctoral positions in SISSA (Italy), KTH (Sweden), Tor Vergata (Italy). He has a broad background ranging from pure mathematics and computer science in academia to hands-on enterprise software development. At HSE he will be studying brain activities' synchronization and working on neuronal processes modeling.

Beatriz Martin Luengo is a Research Fellow at the Centre; she holds PhD from the University of Basque Country (Spain) and is spending her second year at HSE.

Centre for Historical Research (HSE St. Petersburg)

Matthias Battis is a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre. He received his PhD in History from the University of Oxford in 2016 for a study on the Russian Orientalist and former colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873-1958). Previously, Matthias has studied Russian and Eastern European Studies at Oxford and History and Cultural Studies at the universities of Warsaw and Frankfurt (Oder). He is primarily a historian of the Soviet Union with a particular interest in Central Asia. His main languages of research are Russian, Polish, German and, to a lesser extent, Persian.

Anton Kotenko is a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre, and he received his PhD in 2014 in Budapest, where he defended his doctoral dissertation “The Ukrainian project in search of national space, 1861–1914.” Currently he works on turning the dissertation into a book. His academic interests include history of European modernity, nationalism and science in the nineteenth – first half of the twentieth centuries.

The International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences

Michael Loader is a Research Fellow at the Centre; he received his PhD in November 2015 from King’s College London. His previous research examined the history of national politics in Soviet Latvia in the 1950s and 1960s. His research interests include nationality policy and ethnic relations in the USSR, and Soviet high politics. His current research project is about Soviet patronage and power relationships and the career of Politburo member Arvids Pelshe.

Angelina Lucento is a Research Fellow and a lecturer at the Centre and received her PhD in art history from Northwestern University. Her areas of concentration are the history and politics of representation in Soviet and post-Soviet visual culture, the material histories of painting and photography in global culture, and the global consequences of the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, and she talked to The HSE Look about her interests in December issue (2015). Lucento is currently completing her book Touched Surfaces: The Politics and Aesthetics of Figuration in Soviet Art, 1918-1941.

Erina T. Megowan is a Research Fellow at the Centre; she received her PhD in History in 2016 from Georgetown University, where she specialized in the cultural and social history of the Soviet Union. While at HSE she will be working on a project examining the role of Soviet cultural institutions and creative intelligentsia in World War II, an expanded version of her dissertation on the wartime evacuation of elite cultural institutions from Moscow and Leningrad to the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia.

Jessica Werneke is a Research Fellow at the Centre; she received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Her previous research in the history of Soviet visual culture evaluated the role of photography and photojournalism in illustrated journals in the 1950s and 1960s. Her current research interests include sexuality and gender in Soviet visual culture, nudity and eroticism in Soviet amateur photography, and the history of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde.

International Centre for the Study of Institutions and Development

Maria Giulia Silvagni is a Research Fellow at the Centre; she received her PhD in Economics in 2012 from the University of Bologna defending a thesis on Russian regional inequalities. She later worked as a postdoctoral fellow and teaching assistant in micro and international economics, and her research interests at HSE cover economic history and institutional economics.

International Research Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms

Igor Fedotenkov is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory; he obtained his PhD from Tilburg University in 2012. In his PhD thesis, he studied links between pension systems and macroeconomic indicators. Later he did research at University of Verona and (Central) Bank of Lithuania. His interests include monetary economics (including post-Keynesian monetary economics), links between demography and macroeconomic factors, specific topics in political economy and nonparametric statistics.

International Research and Teaching Laboratory for Socio-Cultural Research

Kirill Ilnitski is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory; he received his PhD from University of Trento and Free University of Berlin.

Institute of Education

Zumrad Kataeva is a Research Fellow at the Institute; she received her PhD degree from the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation of the University of Kentucky, USA. Her doctoral dissertation was focused upon how the reforms and challenges in higher education in Post-Soviet Tajikistan have affected professional lives of university faculty members. Zumrad Kataeva is a recipient of the Doctoral Fellowship Program of the Open Society Foundation. Her research interests include higher education transformations in Post-Soviet countries.

Laboratory for Applied Analysis of Institutions and Social Capital

Svetlana Inkina is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory; she holds PhD of University of Toronto.

Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Empirical Studies in Perm

Alexey Buzmakov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory. He holds PhD of Universit´e de Lorraine, France. His research focuses on data mining and machine learning (see May issue 2016 for more details).

Sofya Kulikova is a Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory; she holds PhD of Université Paris-Descartes (France), and she gave a short interview to The HSE Look during her first year at HSE (see December issue of 2015).

Laboratory for Methods of Big Data Analysis

Denis Derkach is a Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory. He holds PhD of Université ParisSud XI (France) in Physics of elementary particles, and gave an interview to The HSE Look about his research interests and plans in December issue of 2015, during his first year at HSE.

Laboratory for Neurolinguistics

Ekaterina Tomas is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory; she received her PhD from Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) in 2015, specialising in child language acquisition. After that she worked as a Senior Lecturer at Novosibirsk State University, teaching courses in Psycholinguistics and Applied Linguistics. In HSE she will lead the line of research which focuses on the linguistic development of young typically developing children and those with language difficulties, using cutting-edge behavioural and neurophysiological methods.

Laboratory for Stochastic Analysis

Harold Andrés Moreno Franco is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory. He did his bachelor degree in mathematics at the National University of Colombia, his master degree and PhD at the Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT), Mexico. His research interests are in partial differential equations and integro-differential equations which are closely related to stochastic control problems. Particularly, his research is focused in studying the existence, uniqueness and regularity of solutions to Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations whose operator is an integro-differential operator.

Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology

Anna Kruglova is a Research Fellow at the Laboratory; she received her PhD in Anthropology from University of Toronto.

School of Philology

Mark Taylor is a Research Fellow joining the School of Philology at the Faculty of Humanities. His research addresses the environment in British modernist literature, and how writers responded to the competing evolutionary theories prominent in the early twentieth century. He is particularly interested in the work of Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster. His doctorate was awarded by the University of Oxford. Previously, he studied at Cardiff University, and the University of Sheffield.

 

December 27, 2016