A New Season of the ICEF Academy Begins

ICEF has launched a new season of the ICEF Academy, a programme offering motivated students an enhanced academic and intellectual challenge. Oleg Zamkov, ICEF Deputy Director, welcomed the students and presented certificates to the winners of the programme for the 2025–2026 academic year. The top-performing students were awarded a fully funded trip, sponsored by ICEF, to the Summer School at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE) in China.

The following students were named winners of the ICEF Academy for the 2025–2026 academic year:

Second-year Bachelor's students:

Daria Bocharova
Artemiy Demidov
Andrey Kalenykh

Third-year Bachelor's students:

Sofia Bogdan
Sofia Korneeva
Arina Krasilnikova

Congratulations to our winners!

Tatiana Maiskaya, PhD, Associate Professor and Academic Director of the ICEF Academy, and Alexander Usvitsky, PhD, Assistant Professor and Head of the Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Finance (LEEF), spoke about their own paths in research, the opportunities the programme offers students, and the prospects of pursuing an academic career.

According to Tatiana Maiskaya, research questions never come with ready-made answers. By engaging in research, students therefore develop a fundamentally new set of skills compared with those acquired through standard academic courses.

Yaroslav Lyulko, PhD, Assistant Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence in Mathematical Finance, Lecturer of the Advanced Course in Statistics, and head of the research seminar Quantitative Analysis in Finance at the ICEF Academy, emphasised that research skills are equally important for careers outside academia.

Professor, PhD Olga Kuzina, speaking about her ICEF Academy course Researcher’s Toolkit: Turning Ideas into Research, noted that one of her main goals is to spark students’ interest and demonstrate just how fascinating research can be. Research at the intersection of economics and sociology provides opportunities to analyse consumer behaviour and other economic processes.

Andrey Dementiev, Director for Teaching Excellence Development and Senior Lecturer, has taught one of the Academy’s most popular courses, Economic Thinking, for several years. He explained how the course is structured and how students use AI methods and tackle non-standard problems, with a particular emphasis on working with artificial intelligence models.

The meeting took place in a warm and friendly atmosphere. Junior students showed great interest in the ICEF Academy programme, which began its new season on October 5, 2026.

We wish all ICEF Academy students every success in their courses!