Research & Expertise

Teaching is a stressful job, and with schools and universities operating remotely over the last eighteen months, teachers’ worries have increased dramatically. In the latest in a series of articles on distance learning, IQ.HSE reports on research conducted by the HSE University Institute of Education on how teachers have been coping with stress.

75% of papers published in post-Soviet countries are by Russian researchers. In total, about 3% of all papers published globally are from post-Soviet countries. The role of universities has grown over the last 30 years, with over half of all recent academic papers being made with the participation of university researchers. These are the conclusions made in a study of publication activity by scholars in post-Soviet countries.

Free education and social security appear to be more important for Russians than the freedom of expression or the freedom of movement. The majority of Russians, especially younger people, look to the state for assistance and choose responsible consumption merely as a way to save money. IQ.HSE selected nine facts about various aspects of people's lives based on findings from a nationwide representative survey conducted by the HSE Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Nonprofit Sector as part of the Monitoring of the Status of Civil Society project.

HSE University researchers Evgeny Osin and Irina Turilina conducted an intervention study looking into the effectiveness of a short-term online mindfulness meditation course. They discovered that even after a three-week course of daily 10 to 15-minute meditation sessions, novice participants benefitted from improved emotional wellbeing, concentration, motivation and self-reflection. The practitioners were also less likely to fixate on negative thoughts. However, these effects only applied to people who already had sufficiently high levels of self-control and motivation to meditate and were thus less likely to give up on the practice. The research is presented in an article published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being

A team of Russian researchers from HSE University, the Russian Space Research Institute, and the Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism (Russian Academy of Sciences) has described the development of modulational instability of electromagnetic waves in dusty ionospheric plasma, which is caused by a high intensity of electromagnetic emissions. The researchers considered inelastic collisions of ionospheric plasma particles and formulated new tasks and applications to be addressed at a later stage. The results are published in the Physics of Plasmas journal.

HSE University economists question whether Russian STEM specialists are better paid than non-STEM specialists. They compare wages of professionals with STEM and no STEM majors, and those working in STEM and no STEM jobs and explore how the gap evolves over the life cycle. They find that there is no advantage of STEM major and STEM job over their no STEM alternative. They present their findings in a paper published in the Voprosy Ekonomiki journal.

How can a small Russian research group become a world-famous scientific centre in less than a decade? A special edition of the Frontiers in Psychologyjournal devoted to increasing public awareness of neuroscience features an article about the HSE University Center for Language and Brain, including the successes and challenges of its early years.

Russian and international researchers should intensify their joint efforts to analyze the changes in higher education over the past year and a half.    Speaking at a round table held in the International Multimedia Centre of the Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) news agency, HSE Rector Nikita Anisimov suggested that this work be done as part of the International Observatory for Higher Education Transformations—a global research programme launched by HSE University and the Polytechnic University of Milan.

A group of scientists from Hungary, Russia and Finland have developed a system capable of selecting cancer cells of a specific shape and size—spheroids. SpheroidPicker, the first AI device of its kind, enables a more standardized approach to working with tumour samples. The results of the research have been published in the journal Scientific Reports. One of researchers who worked on the project is Nikita Moshkov, Junior Research Fellow of the Laboratory on AI for Computational Biology.

The Fourth ICEF Conference on Applied Economics will present the studies conducted by scholars at the universities across the world, that relate to education. We talked with Fabian Slonimczyk, an Associate Professor at ICEF and the conference organizing committee member, to learn more about the highlights of this year’s conference.