News

In August, the HSE University-St Petersburg Summer School came to an end. The participants attended courses in political science, Russian, and finance given by professors of HSE University-St Petersburg, got to know the city, and saw the sights as part of the cultural programme. The summer school hosted students from nine countries: China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Uzbekistan and Russia.

Behrang Kamali-Shahdadi, from Iran, recently joined the HSE University Department of Theoretical Economics as an assistant professor and will start teaching courses in autumn 2023. In his interview, he shares his experiences of getting a PhD from an Ivy League university, working at a new university in Iran, and his research on matching attorneys to poor defendants, unskilled workers to firms, and baby boomers to universities.

Researchers of the HSE Graduate School of Business trained a machine-learning (ML) model to infer users' subjective wellbeing from social media posts. Having processed 10 million tweets, the researchers compiled a rating of holidays celebrated in Russia based on their popularity. The New Year tops the list, but Russian-speaking users of Twitter are also happy to celebrate Defender of the Fatherland Day, International Women's Day, and Halloween. The study findings have been published in PeerJ Computer Science.

Thu Trang Pham is a 23-year old HSE University student from Vietnam. She is currently in her fourth year of studies at theFaculty of World Economy and International Relations. Thu Trang spoke to the HSE News Service about why HSE is the perfect university for international students, life in her dormitory, and how she plans to make the most of her final year of studies by travelling around Moscow and Russia.

September 15 is the deadline to submit application documents for the Master’s in Applied Statistics with Network Analysis, Russia’s first English-language online programme in applied statistics. The HSE University programme trains specialists capable of working with data for strategising business processes and analysing the system of interactions between companies and people.

Researchers from HSE University have analysed why people feel happier when they help others. It turns out that joy is caused by different reasons, depending on who we help — relatives or strangers. In both cases, happiness brings moral satisfaction from doing a good deed, but helping loved ones is also associated with satisfying the need for belonging and acceptance, while helping strangers provides a sense of autonomy. The results of the research were published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

On August 22, the deputies of the Perm City Duma elected the new head of the city: Eduard Sosnin, HSE graduate and Minister for Economic Development and Investment of the Perm Region.

Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Assistant Professor at the HSE School of Sociology, Moscow, has worked at HSE since 2017. In 2022, he was named one of the university’s best teachers by student vote. He has published several papers in internationally recognised journals and supervised a number of doctoral students. Below, Dr Chowdhury talks about his research career, the changes in the global academic environment, and the larger role of international scholarly cooperation.