First Cyberpsychology Department in Russia Opens at Lobachevsky University
The first cyberpsychology department in Russia has been established at Lobachevsky University (Nizhny Novgorod State University, NNSU). Graduates of this department will become specialists who combine expertise in psychology, neuroscience, and information technology.
According to the university, students of the new department will participate not only in analytics but also in the development of new IT solutions. The curriculum will include the study of devices for diagnosing the condition of esports athletes, stress detectors for professionals ranging from train operators to remote workers, and smart clothing that tracks employees’ well-being throughout the workday.
“The uniqueness of our approach is that we start with the individual. Our assessments are based on user psychology. In the typical setup with a marketer, designer, and developer, there are often no objective criteria for evaluating the ‘user-friendliness’ of a website or application. Cyberpsychology department specialists, using test and experiment results, will be able to determine how to improve a product to make it more in demand,” said Valeria Demaryova, head of the Cyberpsychology Laboratory at the Faculty of Social Sciences, NNSU.
The university has also announced, via its social media, an English-language master’s program in cyberpsychology for international students completing their bachelor’s degrees.
Graduates of the NNSU master’s program in cyberpsychology work as usability specialists in leading Russian IT companies. They test the user interface of new websites or IT products, assess how convenient they are for clients, and provide recommendations to developers and designers based on objective scientific data.
The NNSU master’s program in cyberpsychology combines cognitive and neuroscience studies with foundational knowledge in information technology. In the future, the program’s creators plan to deepen the training so that graduates can obtain a full-fledged IT specialty. For some time now, NNSU cyberpsychologists have also been taking courses in programming and big data.
In 2021, Lobachevsky University students won the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), solving 12 out of 15 real-world problems. A total of 119 teams from 40 countries participated in the competition.