Skolkovo's MIT Seeks to Stop Brain Drain

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — "I'm probably not going to move back for a couple of decades," said Yekaterina Paramonova, a third-year undergraduate majoring in nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, echoing the sentiment of many Russians who have tasted life outside the motherland.
"In the United States, there are secure job opportunities, and you know the process to obtain a job isn't really corrupt, but in Russia you need to have connections," she said.
Paramonova, an aspiring young scientist whose parents immigrated to the United States four months before she was born, was one of many representatives of the Russian diaspora gathered last week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the founding conference of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, or ­SkTech — a joint venture of MIT and President Dmitry Medvedev's Skolkovo Innovation Center announced in October.
The new institute will be situated at the Skolkovo site in the Moscow suburbs, its core language will be English, and it will be focused on entrepreneurship and bringing research to market.
The Skolkovo Innovation Center is a government initiative striving to concentrate industry, academia and investors in a single location to form a Silicon Valley on the outskirts of the country's capital.
The new university is intended for Russian graduate students so they can attend a world-class research-based institution while staying in the Russian Federation, said SkTech president Edward Crawley, an MIT professor who has served as chairman of the NASA technology and commercialization advisory committee.
The brain drain has had a major impact on the nation's economy and educational system. Each year, 15 percent of graduates leave the country, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, 800 institutes have closed their doors. In all, about 800,000 scientists have emigrated from Russia, said Almaz Capital partner Sergei Beloussov during a presentation at the conference.
Rutgers University professor of molecular biology Konstantin Severinov bucked the trend and returned to head a lab at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Molecular Genetics in Moscow in 2005. Since then, he has become one of four faculty fellows for SkTech. He witnessed 40 talented Russian students passing through his Rutgers' lab, but only two returned home — a tendency he hopes to reverse.

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