Ekaterina Volzhenina

What defines a good university? Is it students’ achievements, cutting-edge research, or bright projects? The success of the university depends on many different things – that’s why international university rankings use complex methodologies and take many criteria into account. The administration is a thing often forgotten. They are often overlooked, despite being responsible for a lot of stuff. To correct this injustice, we are starting a series on the invisible heroes of the academe. Our first is Ekaterina Volzhenina, manager of the Centre of Deep Learning and Bayesian Methods, who is also teaching history at HSE University. She told us about the transformation of her work during the quarantine, how our ancestors fought the Pechenegs and tried to answer the main question: hard and soft science?