When Circumstances Are Stronger Than Habits: How Financial Stress Affects Smoking Cessation
HSE researchers have found that the likelihood of quitting smoking rises with increasing financial struggles. While low levels of financial difficulties do not affect smoking behaviour, moderate financial stress can increase the probability of quitting by 13% to 21%. Responses to high financial stress differ by gender: men are almost 1.5 times more likely to give up cigarettes than under normal conditions, whereas no significant effect is observed on women’s decisions to quit smoking. These conclusions are based on data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) for 2000–2023 and have been published in Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes.
‘It’s Almost Impossible Not to Meet People and Make Friends as an HSE Student’
Victoria Ramos Gonzales, from Bolivia, fell in love with Moscow after visiting the city in 2022. Now, as a student of the ‘Master in International Management’ programme at the HSE Graduate School of Business, she researches management systems with a focus on Latin America. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Victoria talks about choosing to study at HSE University–Moscow, presenting her research to experts at a seminar, and finding the confidence to use Russian in daily life.
HSE Researchers Propose New Method of Verbal Fluency Analysis for Early Detection of Cognitive Impairment
Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain and the Mental Health Research Centre have proposed a new method of linguistic analysis that enables the distinction between normal and pathological ageing. Using this approach, they showed that patterns in patients’ word choices during verbal fluency tests allow clinicians to more accurately differentiate clinically significant impairments from subjective memory complaints. Incorporating this type of analysis into clinical practice could improve the accuracy of early dementia diagnosis. The results have been published in Applied Neuropsychology: Adult.
‘HSE Offers a Lot, Not Just Academically, but Also in Terms of Community and Unexpected Opportunities’
Zhou Jinyu, from China, is a fourth-year student of the Bachelor’s programme ‘Data Science and Business Analytics’ at the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science. On March 5, 2026, Zhou Jinyu delivered the report ‘Exploration of Object-Centric Process Mining Using Object-Centric Sequence Diagrams’ as part of the PAIS Lab seminar. In her interview with the HSE News Service, she spoke on her research topic, how object-centric process mining lets data reflect reality, and her overall experience of studying at HSE University.
How the Brain Processes a Word: HSE Researchers Compare Reading Routes in Adults and Children
Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain used magnetoencephalography to study how the brains of adults and children respond to words during reading. They showed that in children the brain takes longer to process words that are frequently used in everyday speech, while rare words and pseudowords are processed in the same way—slowly and in parts. With age, the system is reorganised: high-frequency words shift to a fast route, whereas new letter combinations are still analysed slowly. The study was published in the journal Psychophysiology.
From Spins and Two-Dimensional Materials to Tsunamis and Tornadoes: What HSE Physicists Study
The Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics studies highly complex processes of interaction between molecules and atoms in solids and liquids, the quantum mechanics of these processes, and ultra-thin two-dimensional materials. HSE physicists, together with colleagues from leading academic institutes, investigate the properties of superconductors and topological materials, phenomena at ultra-low temperatures, as well as problems of turbulence and hydrodynamics.
'Science Can Only Be Done Collaboratively'
On March 19, Academician and Professor Andrey Yaroslavtsev, Head of the Joint Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Material Science with the RAS Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, celebrated his birthday. To mark the occasion, he spoke with the HSE News Service about protons, membranes, and other areas of his research.
How Neural Networks Detect and Interpret Wordplay: New Insights from HSE Researchers
An international team including researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science has presented KoWit-24, an annotated dataset of 2,700 Russian-language Kommersant news headlines containing wordplay. The dataset enables an assessment of how artificial intelligence detects and interprets wordplay. Experiments with five large language models show that even advanced systems still make mistakes, and that interpreting wordplay is more challenging for them than detecting it. The results were presented at the RANLP conference; the paper is available on Arxiv.org, and the dataset and the code for reproducing the experiments are available on GitHub.
HSE University Researchers Analyse Education Policy in Fifty Countries
By 2030, the global education system will need 44 million new teachers. Schools have already started rehiring retired teachers and issuing licenses for accelerated programmes. Experts from the HSE University Institute of Education have analysed the educational policies of almost 50 countries and published the report ‘World Education Policy—2025.’
.jpeg "HSE Holds Exams, Quizzes, and Selection Rounds for School Students in Tashkent and Bishkek")
HSE Holds Exams, Quizzes, and Selection Rounds for School Students in Tashkent and Bishkek
More than 3,000 international school students took part in the INTO HSE International Olympiad, whose award ceremonies were held in Tashkent and Bishkek in March 2026. The university’s outreach events also included final examinations, presentations of academic programmes, and on-site selection tests for prospective applicants. In Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, nearly 200 participants received diplomas as winners and prize-winners. The best of them will be eligible to apply for state-funded places at HSE.
Deadline for applications - February 15, 2026