The summer of 2023 was a busy season for the Zimin Foundation and its partners. The School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology (SMTB, https://molbioschool.org/en/ supported by the Zimin Foundation since 2016) has for the first time ever held two offline sessions in one season. The Tartu session featured five labs and eleven courses (both in humanities and natural sciences); the Yerevan session featured eleven and fourteen, respectively. Both sessions ended in a conference where schoolkids could present their completed projects to peers and teachers. Altogether, over 70 children took part in the program. In July, SMTB also held an offline school of bioinformatics in Uzhgorod (Ukraine), with over a hundred participants. Next year, SMTB plans another session in Uzhgorod.

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The first international summer school Languages of Psychiatry: Between Medicine and Anthropology took place in Yerevan on August 24-26. The school, which aims to overcome the limitations of scientific communication and to support scientists in the current situation of crisis, was organized by psychiatrists Dr Joseph Zislin and Dr Elena Davtyan with participation of social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova and support from the Zimin Foundation. The school’s program included 23 lectures for 73 professional researchers and medical practitioners from Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Denmark, Germany, France, Israel, Japan, and Kazakhstan. Its participants came from various fields: psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, speech therapists, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, linguists, mathematicians, bioinformaticians, programmers, students of humanitarian and medical specialties. In the spring of 2024, the next Languages of Psychiatry: Between Medicine and Anthropology school is scheduled to take place with support from the Zimin Foundation.

Among the special guests at the Languages of Psychiatry were medievalist Mikhail Maizels, an Enlightener Prize laureate, and anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova, an Enlightener jury member. Both of them presented talks at the Common Ground book store and culture center within the Enlightener’s public outreach program. The talks attracted a lot of interest, gathering an audience of over 70 listeners.

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