Prof. Dr. Isak Frumin

Head of Observatory of Higher Education Innovations School of Business

Prof. Dr. Isak Frumin is head of Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Constructor University. His expertise is in large-scale, field-based studies of higher education, institutional analysis, and higher education strategy.

  • Fellow of the International Academy of Education and Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Constructor university Bremen.
  • Professor and Head of the Institute of Education at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (2011-2022), one of the largest educational research centers in Europe. Led numerous applied strategy projects aimed at transforming regional universities.
  • Former senior education specialist at the World Bank (2000-2011), focusing on education systems in post-socialist countries, India, and Nepal.
  • Author of more than two hundred publications, edited Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries (with Maia Chankseliani and Igor Fedyukin, 2022).

Research Portfolio

Prof. Dr. Isak Frumin’s work at Constructor Labs connects research on education and learning, applied AI, large-scale knowledge processing, and organizational analysis. He leads two Constructor Labs projects in this area: “Emerging Demands and Innovative Practices in Use of AI in Higher Education and Science”, focused on AI adoption, early adopters, weak signals, and future demand in universities and research organizations; and “Platform for Collecting and Analyzing Web Texts for Social Science and Business Research”, focused on scalable web-data collection and text-analysis infrastructure for research and applied analytics.

His work in these areas is supported by international research collaborations and policy-oriented outputs. The KIHo! project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space, brings together Constructor University and the University of Göttingen to study GenAI adoption in higher education, with a comparative focus including India as an early adopter context. Prof. Frumin is also involved in SCIANCE, a Horizon Europe initiative supporting the development of the RAISE ecosystem for AI-enabled science, where Constructor University and Constructor Knowledge Labs contribute to work on research infrastructures, governance, and cooperation models.

In the EdTech domain, Prof. Frumin’s work focuses on how evidence about AI use in universities and research organizations can inform educational technologies and institutional change. His projects examine where new AI-enabled practices appear, which actors adopt them first, and how these developments affect teaching, administration, research workflows, and platform infrastructures. His EdTech contribution combines empirical monitoring, comparative analysis, and the translation of higher education research into actionable knowledge for universities, research organizations, and education technology teams.

Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education and Science

Investigates how universities and research organizations integrate AI
into teaching, administration, research workflows, and evaluation systems — and with what organizational and economic consequences. The research combines comparative institutional strategy analysis, systematic mapping of emerging AI tools
in practice, and studies of how AI reshapes the scientific process across disciplines.

Publications on Scopus

Platform for Collecting and Analyzing Web Texts for Social Science and Business Research

Emerging Demands and Innovative Practices in Use of AI ​in Higher Education and Science