Sergey Pekarski Elected New Dean of Faculty of Economic Sciences
The HSE Academic Council announced that Sergey Pekarski, Head of the Department of Theoretical Economics, will take over as Dean of Faculty from Oleg Zamulin, who will join Sberbank’s Centre of Macroeconomic Research as Director. Professor Zamulin will retain his position of professor at the faculty and continue teaching.
Oleg Zamulin has headed HSE’s Faculty of Economics since 2011. The university’s youngest dean at the time, Professor Zamulin was tasked with carrying out substantial managerial and structural reforms at the faculty. In an interview shortly after his appointment, he said, ‘I’ve been invited to a cutting-edge university, to its best faculty… It is a little bit scary, but I’m willing to try.’
His attempt proved to be a successful one: he reorganized the structure of the faculty, optimized administrative processes, and appointed academic directors and managers to undergraduate and master’s programmes. Today, these changes seem obvious and are easily taken for granted, but Professor Zamulin’s work made the Faculty of Economic Sciences a model for the rest of the university.
During this time, the faculty’s enrollments have grown considerably, and new laboratories, including international ones, have opened. The faculty’s position in international rankings has improved: it now ranks in the top 150 of the QS Ranking in the category of Economics & Econometrics, the top 200 in Accounting & Finance, and the top 125 of the THE ranking in Business & Economics. In each of the cases, the faculty ranks first amongst its Russian peers. For his contribution to the development of university, Oleg Zamulin was awarded the HSE Honour Award 1st Class.
Sergey Pekarski, who is replacing Oleg Zamulin as Dean of Faculty, has worked at HSE for 20 years. He graduated from the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM) in Applied Mathematics and holds a Master’s degree in Economics from HSE. In 2006, he earned his PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam. In recent years, he has headed the Department of Theoretical Economics and the International Laboratory for Macroeconomic Analysis. Professor Pekarski has been a tenured professor with HSE since 2014.
Speaking at an Academic Council session about his vision for the further development of the faculty, Sergey Pekarski emphasized the need for decreasing class hours and increasing the use of digital technology in teaching and learning. ‘It is necessary, if we want to stay abreast of the new currents in education today,’ he said. Other tasks include responding to the job market’s challenges by opening more joint departments with companies, incorporating project work into teaching, and developing a series of courses in digital economics.
Oleg A. Zamulin