I am a quantitative social scientist at the University of Exeter. I study ethnic groups and inequalities in education, in Russia and in the UK.

Recently completed and ongoing projects:

1. Ethnic differences in reading and mathematical test performance in primary schools in England.

I use school census data from the National Pupil Database to explore reading and maths test scores across ethnic categories and document changes between 2007 and 2018. In most ethnic categories children now perform at the same level or better than their White British peers.

A.Bessudnov. (2023). “Ethnic differences in reading and mathematical test performance in primary schools in England.” SocArXiv. April 20. [Open access]

2. Ethnic and regional inequalities in the Russian military fatalities in the war in Ukraine.

I use a crowdsourced data set on the Russian military fatalities in Ukraine to analyse how the fatality rates varied by ethnicity and region.

A.Bessudnov. (2023). “Ethnic and regional inequalities in Russian military fatalities in Ukraine: Preliminary findings from crowdsourced data.” Demographic Research 48 (31): 883-898. [Open access]

3. Predicting perceived ethnicity with data on personal names in Russia.

VK, the largest Russian social media website, provides an API that can be used for downloading data for social research. However, VK does not record users’ ethnicity. In a recent working paper we developed an ML-based method to code perceived ethnicity with the data on personal names collected on VK.

  • Bessudnov, A. et al. (2023). “Predicting perceived ethnicity with data on personal names in Russia”. Journal of Computational Social Science. [Open access]

Teaching

In Exeter, I teach courses on immigration and quantitative data analysis. Please see details in Teaching.