The 54th International Mendeleev Chemistry Olympiad for high school students took place in mid-July. Hosted by the Lomonosov Moscow State University Chemistry Department, it was the first to be held remotely with 130 students from 27 CIS countries, the Baltic States and South-Eastern Europe, participating. Stepan Epifantsev, a 10th grade student at SESC NSU, was a gold medalist.

Researchers at the NSU Natural Sciences Department’s Laboratory of Protein Engineering studied what happens when moving DNA polymerases, the proteins that copy genetic information, collide with other proteins that are tightly attached to DNA. The results of their work were published in the Swiss journal “Genes”.

An SESC team participated in the international stage of the International Mathematical Modeling Challenge (IMMC) for high school children. Two teams from Russia were among the 53 teams with representatives from 30 countries taking part in the traditionally remote competition.   

Owen Siyoto, an MA graduate of the Big Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence Program at the NSU Mechanics and Mathematics Department, completed a thesis applying the learning transfer and ridge regression concepts to satellite imagery to predict poverty in Zambia.  

Russian scientists were part of an international team that conducted a study on the role of corticosteroid hormones (dexamethasone) on complications and mortality in children undergoing surgery for congenital heart defects. 

Three institutes of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences – Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics, A. P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems – and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (Russia) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU). The Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok will become a centralised platform for communications and launching joint projects.