Ural Federal University: Nine University Projects Receive Support from the Russian Science Foundation

Nine UrFU research projects will receive support from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF). Six projects won the competition in the priority area “Conducting Basic Scientific Research and Exploratory Research by Individual Scientific Groups”. Three projects received an extension of funding.

With the support of grants, university scientists will study the properties of magnetic particles for medical applications, look for ways to modify metals, synthesize new substances for pharmacology, analyze the crisis of values in Britain and Russia, create new magnetic materials, work on segmentelectrics, and propose models for the technological and socioeconomic development of Russian regions. For example, economists led by Irina Turgel, head of the Department for Theory, Methodology and Law Support of State and Municipal Administration at UrFU, will conduct a study of “Creative Reindustrialization of Second-Tier Cities under Conditions of Digital Transformation”.

“The relevance of the study is due to the increasing imbalance of the urban settlement system in Russia. There is a growing concentration of resources in the largest urban agglomerations. The stagnation of industrial cities of the “second echelon” is increasing, including single-industry towns, which constitute the spatial framework of the settlement system and ensure its stability and coherence. New challenges to such cities arise in the context of active reindustrialization and digitalization of the economy,” says Irina Turgel.

As a result of the work, a group of scientists plans to propose a concept within which the process of socio-economic diversification of industrial cities under conditions of digital transformation and the growth of the impression economy can be traced.

Philologists, for example, on the project “Vocabulary as an ideographic map of the world: Universal dictionary-thesaurus of the Russian language” are planning to create a dictionary. The display of semantic groups in schematic form, supported by quantitative and statistical analysis, will serve as the basis for the formation of an idea of an ideographic map of the world, the researchers claim.

“The main scientific problem that the project is aimed at solving is the creation of a global corpus of Russian vocabulary, covering in its totality the words of different parts of speech, its presentation as a Universal Ideographic Dictionary-Thesaurus of the Russian language, seen also as an ideographic world map,” explains Lyudmila Babenko, head of the Department of Fundamental and Applied Linguistics and Textual Science at UrFU and the project manager.