Faculty of Computer Science to Become First HSE Department with Own Endowment
On April 26, the HSE Academic Council approved a charter for the creation of a Board of Trustees in the Faculty of Computer Science. Board members include senior executives from Yandex, JetBrains, SAS, 1C, and Sberbank. The charter for the endowment was approved at the Board’s first meeting, and it will be used by the faculty to fund long-term projects.
The Board is chaired by Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex Group, with Elena Bunina, CEO of Yandex, serving as deputy chair. The Board also includes Andrey Ivanov, Senior Vice President of Investments, Research and Education at JetBrains, Elena Ivashentseva, technology investor, Boris Nuraliev, Director at 1C, Valery Pankratov, CEO at SAS Russia/CIS, and Yulia Chupina, Senior Vice President at Sberbank. The faculty development strategy brought together senior specialists from leading IT companies to serve as trustees with the aim of using their expertise to improve its programmes’ competitiveness.
‘The faculty now has a pool of partners from big companies, with each of whom we have a unique relationship. Cooperation with partners of such high caliber requires detailed elaboration of each project, close collaboration, and more company involvement in the faculty life. That’s why we’ve decided to create the Board,’ says Irina Plisetskaya, Deputy Dean for Development, Finance and Administration at the Faculty of Computer Science.
The first session of the Board, with the participation of HSE Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov and the Faculty management, resolved to create an endowment to support research and studies in computer science. This endowment will be the seventh in the HSE Endowment portfolio and the first one created for a specific faculty.
The HSE Endowment was created in 2007 and is comprised of donations from individuals and companies. In 2018, the HSE University endowment fund received about 50 million rubles in donations. This profit was used to support research, student academic mobility, funding of the April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, and other purposes. As of today, the size of the endowment exceeds 755 million rubles. Its net worth falls behind only that of St. Petersburg State University, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the European University of St. Petersburg.
The Faculty of Computer Science is one of the most dynamic departments at HSE University. This year, it celebrated its five year anniversary—and it has demonstrated impressive growth over the course of its first five years of existence. When it was founded in 2014, the faculty had two research laboratories and four educational programmes (undergraduate and master’s). Today, FCS boasts nine internationally recognized research labs, ten grants from Russian Research Fund, six master’s programmes and three undergraduate programmes, including an English-taught double degree programme with the University of London. The faculty implements joint projects with Samsung, SAS, CERN, JetBrains and Sberbank; it is also expanding its cooperation with Yandex. FCS students regularly win prizes at international competitions, including ICPC, the world’s biggest programming contest. Over the past five years, HSE University has risen in international rankings, making it to the Top-250 of the world’s best universities in computer science in the QS ranking, and the Top-100 in mathematics in the Shanghai Ranking.