Investigations conducted by several Dutch child protection bodies within family situations are inadequate. Due to lack of knowledge, time and money, these investigations are not carried out properly, with major consequences for the families involved.

Leiden University is pressing ahead with Open Science and Recognition & Rewards! This is the key message of the new Academia in Motion steering group.

Two Leiden research projects that focus on increasing the biodiversity of Dutch production systems for food and ornamental horticulture have started thanks to funding from the Dutch Research Council's KIC research programme.

The winners of the JSVO teaching prizes for academic year 2020-2021 were announced at the opening of the faculty year on 7 September 2021.

AMSTERDAM – On the evening of Tuesday, November 19, the Palace Symposium took place at the Royal Palace Amsterdam, with this year’s theme being ‘Biological Design Through Artificial Intelligence’. His Majesty the King and Her Majesty Queen Máxima hosted the event, and Princess Beatrix was also present…

Travel grant call for applications open to people who were identified as female at birth or who identify as female at the time of application for externally-funded Ph.D. students (not funded by any outside source such as ERC, NWO, etc.) and/or staff members (postdoc, docent, UD, permanent/non-permanent…

Organisation

Senior Researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and Associate Fellow of The Hague Program of Cyber Norms François Delerue was awarded the 2021 Book Prize of the European Society of International Law for his book Cyber Operations and International Law published by Cambridge University…

Organisation

On Tuesday 25 November, Leiden University is holding the first of four sessions on ‘Building Academic Freedom’. Students and staff are invited to a conversation about today’s hot-button issues.

On Tuesday 27 May a first meeting was held in response to the demonstration and occupation at the Wijnhaven building on 6 May. The aim was to explore how the university can balance the fundamental right to protest with ensuring a safe environment for all students and staff.

NUFFIC’s Orange Knowledge programme, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, awarded a grant to the proposal of Jacqueline Vel, Adriaan Bedner and Leiden alumnus Fachrizal Afandi just before the Christmas holidays.

That one handy little tool to do a quiz with students: can you use that or will you inadvertently put their privacy at risk? New privacy guidelines offers a solution.

The United Nations has declared May 22 the International Day for Biological Diversity. A moment of global reflection on everything on Earth and its indispensability. Anthropologist Marja Spierenburg stresses the importance of the interaction between natural and social sciences in addressing sustainability…

As of 1 November, Jan Vonk has been appointed full professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute (MI). The institute is delighted with Jan’s appointment, as is he. ‘At the MI we combine the abstract with the concrete like no other.’

Fanny Wonu Veys was appointed Professor of Art and Material Culture of Oceania on 1 August. Time for an introduction.

Technology is spreading its tendrils into the classroom. But who is in control?

The Leiden University team representing the International Institute of Air and Space Law (IIASL) won the World Finals of the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition that took place in Paris on 20 September 2022.

The second quantum revolution is in full swing, bringing all kinds of new technologies to within reach, and offering many opportunities as well as challenges. Leiden and Delft decided to join forces.

During the HALON hacking competition, 28 teams had one goal: to find as many vulnerabilities as possible in the systems of Dutch higher education institutions. Research software engineer Chris Handy participated on his own and ended up in second place in the category ‘Vulnerabilities found at the highest…

How can you use AI in your research? And how can we implement new digital technologies within our faculty, with support from the experts we already have in-house? These were the central questions explored on the afternoon of Tuesday, 10 December, during the eScience event. Here are the key takeaways…

During a well-attended Studium Generale lecture at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Professor Ellen de Bruijn demonstrated how hormonal fluctuations influence the female brain. 'We urgently need more attention for the mental health of girls and women during transitional periods.'

Soil ecologists Emilia Hannula (Leiden) and Elly Morriën (UvA) received the Golden Medal of Teylers Tweede Genootschap on 5 November. They received the prize for their submission to a competition on sustainable soil management.

Recently, Jaap van den Herik, professor emeritus Law and IT, was interviewed by the BNVKI (Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence).

Ten underage boys are due to appear before a juvenile court. They are accused of luring and attacking nine men whom they believed were paedophiles. Last October, one attack cost a 73-year-old former teacher from Arnhem his life.

Heritage Quest is a large-scale citizen science project in the field of archaeology that allows anyone to contribute to scientific research. It is the first large-scale archaeological citizen science project in The Netherlands and one of the few of its kind in the world. As part of the Cultural Heritage…

It was not light, but its absence that caught Stephanie Noach's attention a few years ago. With her research on darkness in art, she aims to show how darkness can question and sometimes even undermine colonial imagery.

The tour for programme chairs through the new Humanities Hub covered just one corridor. Previously, the labs were spread across the campus, but now most of them have been consolidated in the Huizinga Building.

Dutch municipalities are racing to digitalise, introducing virtual services, fraud-detection algorithms and more. The digital city may not always serve its residents. Professor Jiska Engelbert calls for civil servants who dare to push back.

If you missed the annual LUCDH Winter School Week of Digital Humanities workshops and Pilot Project Symposium (27 – 31 January 2025) this time around, you’ll have a chance to take part next year. Save the dates for the last week of January 2026!

Nico Verloop, Professor Emeritus of Educational Studies at Leiden University, passed away on 5 June 2025. Nico was the founder and first professor-director (from 1995-2010) of ICLON (Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching) at Leiden University.

Freya Baetens, Professor of European Law, has been awarded a Chair by the Francqui Foundation in Belgium for the impact of her work on lawmaking and policymaking in Europe and beyond.

As of this academic year, all our faculties will be using the same platform for digital assessment: Ans. While this platform is already familiar in many faculties, it will be new for the staff and students of Social & Behavioural Sciences (from 1 September) and Humanities (from 1 February), as they…

Mingmin Gong

Met een openingswoord, een paneldiscussie op de Spaanse Trappen in Wijnhaven en een druk op de rode knop voor het gebouw zelf, is POPcorner The Hague donderdagmiddag officieel geopend door rector magnificus Hester Bijl.

Salvador Santino Regilme has been selected for a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Amsterdam. From September 2022, he will spend 5 months at NIAS working on his research project titled 'The Normative Order of the Global War on Drugs'.

It is the eighth year in a row that the Faculty of Archaeology is placed in the top ten of archaeological institutes worldwide. The QS World University Rankings by Subject looks at criteria like academic reputation and citation ratios.

On 10 March 2023, the Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law (ACTL) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) organised the Conference ‘Towards eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in Taxation: The Future of Good Tax Governanceon’.

Recently, Carlotta Rigotti participated in the ViolenceStop project, a collaboration between Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and the Central University “Marta Abreu” of Las Villas (Cuba).

'I hope to contribute to a better understanding of social dilemmas we constantly face, like those that arise with climate change or the current pandemic,' says social and organisational psychologist Jörg Gross in an interview on his Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC).

A flood of news reports, push notifications and even extra news broadcasts: on Wednesday, the world was shocked by the storming of the Capitol in Washington. Americanist Sara Polak discusses the events.

Paul Gobée (LUMC), Kirsty Rolfe (Humanities) and Frank Takes (Science) have been nominated for the Leiden Teaching Prize 2023.

Neuroscientist Simeen Tabassi Mofrad has been awarded a Rubicon grant to conduct research on cortical and allelic determinants of age-related cognitive decline at University of Oxford. She holds the first rank among all Rubicon applicants in NWO Domain Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).

On Thursday 23 November, Professor Betty de Hart delivered the lecture ‘Exploring the Legal Archive on Race: Methodological Challenges’ as part of the lecture series ‘Reconsidering the Socio-Legal Gaze’ organized by the Van Vollenhoven Institute. Over 40 people attended the lecture, held online due…

Leiden health psychologist Liesbeth Van Vliet receives recognition for her research on doctor-patient communication and its influence on quality of healthcare. Van Vliet has been awarded one of four Heineken Young Scientists Award 2022 for promising young researchers working in the Netherlands.

Leiden University joins the Just Transitions for AMR Working Group, an interdisciplinary team of social science and humanities researchers who are exploring ways to mitigate the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance in a just and equitable manner, with due consideration to the human rights of present…

The development of the Faculty Strategic Plan (FSP) did not come to a standstill over the summer. We now have a draft version of the Plan that incorporates the feedback on the strategic objectives that we obtained from various meetings and bodies before the summer. The Research Directors and a number…

Wouter Weeda has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute of Psychology by the Board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. He will start on 1 December 2025 for a period of three years, succeeding Hanneke Hulst.

Carlo Beenakker has been appointed a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organisation behind the journal Science. Among the Fellows, he is the third Dutch person and first Leiden researcher.