Research & Expertise

The devices, created by student teams, will conduct space research on the properties of promising solar cells, on-board energy storage systems, and serial electronics for student satellites.

Digital ecosystems have evolved from a technological innovation into a fundamental institution of the modern economy over the past few years. According to HSE University’s latest estimates, they account for 8.5% of Russia’s GDP. Previously, no jurisdiction had a statutory definition of what constitutes a digital ecosystem. HSE University researchers have addressed this gap by proposing the first legal concept of a digital ecosystem. Their article, ‘The Digital Ecosystem as a Novel Economic Phenomenon and Legal Concept,’ has been published in the BRICS Law Journal.

Researchers from the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences have shown that the accuracy of birth rate forecasts for Russia can be improved by almost 50% by incorporating the dynamics of online search queries related to pregnancy and childbirth into forecasting models. In the best-performing models, the forecasting error fell from 4.6% to 3.2%. The findings have been published in Populations and Economics.

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Arctic Studies at the Institute for Economics of Natural Resources and Climate Change organised HSE University's first summer school on international relations in the Svalbard archipelago. Alongside lectures and fieldwork, 14 participants from Russia and South Korea developed practical solutions for implementing multilateral cooperation projects in the Arctic.

HSE University and the Russia Renewable Energy Development Association (RREDA) have signed a partnership and information cooperation agreement to support Renewable Energy of the Planet—2026, a national competition with international participation for students and early-career researchers. Applications are open on the competition's website until September 20, 2026.

A development project for Novy Urengoy, prepared by the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism at the HSE Faculty of Urban and Regional Development (FURD), has beenshortlisted for the Guangzhou Award for Urban Innovation, one of the world’s leading international competitions in urban planning.

Scientists at HSE MIEM have proposed a mathematical model explaining how interactions between societies can influence their stability. Based on the classical theory of evolutionary games, the study reveals an unexpected effect: even a weak informational influence of one society on another can cause one society to remain stable while the other exhibits chaotic behaviour among its individual members. The study has been published in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.

Scientists from HSE University, MSU, and Tallinn University of Technology have studied a fossil species of ancient brachiopods that lived in a warm sea in what is now northern Estonia more than 445 million years ago. These ancient brachiopods developed a cup-shaped shell with a protective 'cap' that shielded them from overgrowth by other marine organisms. The study has been published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from HSE University–St Petersburg, has developed microlasers that emit deep-ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 255 nanometres. The devices operate at room temperature, and the smallest of them measures just two micrometres in diameter—roughly the size of a bacterium. These microlasers could be used in sensors, spectroscopic systems, photonic chips, and communication devices. The paper has been published in Optics & Laser Technology.

Psycholinguists from the Centre for Language and Brain at HSE University–St Petersburg have shown that words that are frequently misspelled are processed more slowly by readers, even when presented with the correct spelling. The researchers confirmed this effect for the first time using Russian-language materials and found that response speed is most strongly linked to how confidently individuals can distinguish the correct spelling of a word from an incorrect one. The study has been published in The Mental Lexicon.