On January 21, Russia celebrated Postgraduates Day. Today, the image of the researcher has become more modern and attractive to young people. There are 326 postgraduates taking different courses at Saratov State University, 111 of them were enrolled in 2023.
It is often at this level that the career of young scientists begins, this is the first step towards their development. To help them focus on solving scientific issues, the President of the country announced at the Congress of Young Scientists an increase in scholarships for certain categories of postgraduates to 75 thousand roubles.
Dozens of projects aimed at supporting novice researchers are implemented at SSU. Postgraduates have scholarships from the President of the Russian Federation to young scientists and postgraduates engaged in promising research and development in priority areas of modernisation of the Russian economy; RFBR grants owners as part of the contests in 2019 and 2020 for the best projects of fundamental research carried out by young scientists taking (RFBR-Postgraduates); co-executers of grants from the President of the Russian Federation for young candidates and doctors of sciences, as well as executors of grants from Russian Science Foundation and government mega-grants.
The final stage of the RFBR-Postgraduates contest is considered to be have the right to present prepared dissertations in one of the dissertation councils of the country. The first eighteen RFBR projects were implemented from October 2019 to September 2022. There were thirteen more projects from October 2020 to September 2023. In total, eighteen postgraduates were allowed to present their dissertations in 2022, and eleven more in 2023.
Some of the postgraduates who successfully presented their theses ahead of the schedule are Anastasia Plotnikova, Pavel Barkov, Maria Kuznetsova, Vitalii Khanadeyev, and Elena Rybalova.
The university congratulates young researchers and hopes they will gain new victories on their way to scientific heights!
We asked a few questions to those who are still taking postgraduate courses and who recently graduated and have already successfully presented their PhD theses. A postgraduate Alexei Khramkov is to start the series of our dialogues with young scientists:
– As an undergraduate, I began participating in the studies carried out by the staff of the Department of Dynamic Modelling and Biomedical Engineering. And then I realised that I wanted to continue working in this team and develop further. I decided to take a postgraduate course to continue improving my skills and successfully present my PhD thesis.
First of all, I am interested in the development of new methods for the diagnosis of diseases and the analysis of biomedical data.
The main advantage of the postgraduate course for me is the opportunity to combine work with study. Since you study not so many hours, you can devote more time to research and work at the university.
Now, I am implementing two grants of the Russian Academy of Sciences No. 23-12-00241 Modelling of complex vibrational biophysical systems and the development of methods for diagnosing connections and synchronizing their elements using experimental signals supervised by Professor, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Anatolii Karavayev and No. 22-75-00086 The study of complex dynamics of contours of vegetative regulation of blood circulation of newborns using methods of nonlinear analysis supervised by Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Victoria Skazkina. As part of my work with these grants, I have developed time series processing software and used it to analyse the experimental recordings.
I consider the publication of two articles in the second quartile journal last year to be the main achievements. My first scientific success began when I was a 2nd-4th student taking a bachelor's degree course, when the first abstracts and articles were published. During my studies at the university, I have taken part in conferences at the national and international levels. I have implemented the grants from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Russian Science Foundation, and Megagrant. In total, I have published fifty co-authored papers during the training, including eleven publications in journals indexed in WoS and Scopus, the seven of which included in the first and second quartiles.
In the future, I would like to find a method to diagnose diseases of the cardiovascular system at an early stage.
Text by Tamara Korneva, photos by Dmitrii Kovshov
Translated by Lyudmila Yefremova
