Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Russian scientists have proposed a theory of phase transformation in polymer gels. It explains the mechanisms of the dramatic reduction in volume of zwitterionic hydrogels when they are cooled. The results are published in the journal Chemical Communications (ChemComm).

The Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre will organize a series of presentations and roundtable discussions as part of theXXII HSE April Conference, which will take place from April 13 to 30, 2021.

From April 13 – 30, 2021, the XXII April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development (AIAC) will be held in Moscow. For the first time, the conference will be co-organized by HSE University and Sberbank.

In celebration of Russia’s Year of Science and Technology, we continue our series about HSE University’s international laboratories, which are headed by world-class scientists and scholars. The first of these, the Laboratory of Algebraic Geometry and Its Applications, was established in October 2010. Below, Laboratory Head Dmitry Kaledin discusses the Lab’s history, research, achievements, and current activities.

April officially marked the beginning of the peak forest fire season across Russia, and preventative measures have recently been discussed at the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters (also known as The Ministry of Emergency Situations, MChS) and at a meeting in which the President of the Russian Federation participated. Regions have already started taking measures to prevent forest fires, and a team of researchers from the Faculty of Economic Sciences of HSE University has proposed a mathematical model by which the effectiveness of these measures can be evaluated. Using this algorithm, they compared Russian regions in terms of the success of their firefighting activities. Details of the work have been published in the collection ‘Dynamics of Disasters: Impact, Risk, Resilience, and Solutions’.

The collective volume Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History, co-edited by David Moon, Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and HSE researcher Alexandra Bekasova, was recently presented at a seminar of the Laboratory for the Environmental and Technological History of the Centre for Historical Research at HSE – St. Petersburg. The book is one of the fruits of a networking project carried out in 2013-2016 with active participation of HSE researchers.

The research and development of new approaches to antitrust regulation in the digital sector, the agro-industrial sector, the pharmaceutical industry, and other markets remain the main focus of the work of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, which operates within HSE University. The Centre's Supervisory Board recently endorsed its work conducted over the past year and supported its agenda for this year.

On March 28-31, 2021, the HSE International Laboratory ‘Russia’s Regions in Historical Perspective’ held an international conference ‘The Russian Far East: Regional and Transnational Perspectives (19th -21st cent.)’. The event was jointly organized by the Laboratory with the German Historical Institute Moscow, Indiana University Bloomington (USA), and the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East FEB RAS (Vladivostok).