Grants and scholarships of the Government of St Petersburg awarded to 82 SPbU students and young scientists

At the awarding ceremony, Governor of St Petersburg Georgii Poltavchenko greeted the winners. Throughout the history of the competition, the grants and scholarships have been awarded as many as 20 thousand young specialists, said Georgii Poltavchenko. Many of them became successful in science. This year, grants and scholarships were awarded to 948 people. “I am pleased that each year we see more and more people who apply for a grant, more and more areas incorporated into the competition where young scientists can fulfill their potential. It says that we are following the right track, and our Strategy of Economic and Social Development of St Petersburg aims to build economics of knowledge”, — said the Governor.

The grants have been awarded to 5 young scientists, 14 Candidate of Sciences, 13 post-graduate students, and 20 students from St Petersburg University.

30 SPbU students will receive scholarship from the Government next year.

The best projects were presented at the round tables in the humanities, engineering, natural and hard sciences. Ekaterina Shcheglova, who is SPbU senior lecturer, Department of Media Linguistics, and won a grant among the young scientists, told us through what she had been working on: “The primary concern of the project was to study the lexis of the travelling essays made by Ivan Goncharov where he described how he had travelled around the world. We chose his essays as they are the key to understanding the Russian travelog of the 19th century. Among the serious practical gains of our projects is that we have compiled a list of words he used in the essays. If we study the words of these texts, that can be regarded as both fiction and documentary, we will contribute greatly into preservation of cultural memory”.

The jury highly praised the project of a SPbU post-graduate student Almara Kulieva, Department of General Psychology that focused on “A sense of control in senso-motor activity in people with different levels of physical activity”. It explains how we approach what we do and how it can influence the world around us. “A sense of control is mostly related to our attitudes, values, and views. They can be called top-down processes. We have concluded that a sense of control is related to our physical activity. If we regularly and actively work out, we are more likely to have a higher level of control over even simple task we have to deal with”, — says Almara Kulieva.