Igor Chirikov Joins UC Berkeley as Academic Director for Landmark ‘SERU’ Project

Igor Chirikov, Academic Supervisor at the IOE Center for Higher Education Sociology, is shortly to commence his term with UC Berkeley (California, the USA) as Academic Director for a major international study, Student Experience in the Research University (SERU).

Based at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), the SERU project is a large-scale global R&D endeavor that seeks to accumulate comprehensive longitudinal evidence about various academic experiences of undergraduate and graduate students within research university environments. The Project Consortium involves a premier cohort of research-intensive academic centers, including UC Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, the International Graduate Insight Group Ltd (i-graduate), HSE University Institute of Education, etc.

Igor Chirikov, who has so far served as HSE Vice Rector and Academic Supervisor at the IOE Center for Higher Education Sociology, will join UC Berkeley in the capacity of Senior Research Fellow at CSHE where he will take the academic helm of the SERU project. In addition, as part of the cooperation framework between HSE and UC Berkeley, an agreement has been reached for a partner R&D unit, the SERU Lab, to be established at the IOE Center for Higher Education Sociology, where Igor will also act as the Academic Lead. At IOE, the newly created SERU Lab will focus on such research areas as university student engagement, factors of student success in various domains of academic life, education inequality, experiences of doctoral students, etc.

The parties are convinced this new format of academic collaboration will help push the frontiers of high-impact scholarship in the realm of higher education sociology, while providing novel and more meaningful R&D insights to promote robust policy decisions in the field.