Neanderthals were able to make fire on a large scale with the aid of pyrite and hand-axes. This means they could decide when and where they wanted fire and were not dependent on natural fire, as was thought earlier. Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen has discovered the first material evidence for this. Publication…

Peter Scholten is one of the four professors that were officially appointed as Leiden-Delft-Erasmus professor last week. Apart from his appointment at the Erasmus University, he has now also been appointed at FGGA. We asked Scholten five questions about his double appointment and the collaboration between…

From ransomware to Citrix traffic jams: over the past few months Dutch organisations were regularly brought to a standstill by serious cyber attacks. We can only face these threats by standing as one, and universities and government should take the lead. These are the words of Leiden professors Bibi…

According to a new study, for half of the world population the answer would be yes. For the other half: maybe? Leiden environmental researcher and head author Nicolas Navarre explains: ‘With improvements to crop yields, reductions in food waste, and changes in consumption patterns, 90% of people could…

Imagine: you are at the end of your fieldwork in Peru and ready to go home when all flights get canceled because of Covid-19. It happened to master student Visual Ethnography Mark Lindenberg. By now, four months later than scheduled, he is back in the Netherlands. How does he look back? And what was…

The government is digitalizing and making use of ‘big data’ in its decision making processes. But the expectations of digitalization are often overly optimistic, according to Bram Klieving, Professor Digitalization and Public Policy. Klievink is about to start with multidisciplinary research looking…

Four lecturers from Leiden University will receive a 50,000-euro Comenius Teaching Fellow grant. This will enable them and their team to realise an educational innovation within their own teaching.

Good news for international collaboration: the EU’s International Credit Mobility programme has awarded 163 grants to students and researchers from Leiden University and partner universities in 19 countries outside the EU. The grants are for 19 projects that have arisen from existing partnerships.

Leiden Law School alumnus Dave Wesselink began his career as a lawyer in 2022. He’s also a professional bobsledder. ‘When you’re tearing round a bend at 130km/hour, you need to be able to stay calm and focused on what you’re doing.’

Robert Ietswaart does research into gene regulation at the famous Harvard Medical School in Boston. He developed an algorithm to better predict whether a candidate medicine is going to produce side effects. He studied mathematics and physics in Leiden, and gained his PhD in computational biology in…

The travel ban and closed borders have had a big impact on our students and staff. Some are stranded abroad, while others are stranded here in the Netherlands. Others again have returned early to their home country. Three personal stories from Wuhan, Leiden and The Hague.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics has been badly affected by the corona crisis: the research in the four labs and the fieldwork has come to a standstill. What are the implications?

The integrity and reliability of academic research are of fundamental importance to the University. All parties, both within the University and outside, must be able to have confidence that our research is conducted in a scrupulous, fair, verifiable, impartial and independent manner.

As children learn, develop and acquire more skills, their legal position also changes. Professor of Children’s Rights Ton Liefaard works closely together with Leiden social sciences researchers to shed light on these growing capacities and their implications for our legal system. ‘Our ideas about children’s…

Lodewijk Petram, author of the book 'The World's First Stock Exchange', discussed the rise of the Amsterdam stock exchange in the 17th century in the ninth Hazelhoff Guest Lecture.

You can do a degree in Artificial Intelligence at Leiden University, but its role is also increasing in other degree programmes.

Speech Prosody 2024 includes three exciting tutorials. Below you will find the description as well as the recording of all three of them.

What is the effect of pesticides, fertilizers or plastic on water quality? And how do wind and rain affect the data? These are just some of the things that Leiden environmental scientists study in the 32 ditches of the Living Lab.

The Van Loon project sets out to safeguard the archives of Dutch archaeologist Maurits van Loon (Amsterdam, September 22, 1923 - Montpellier, October 12, 2006) and make them accessible for further study.

Treatment and care for cancer patients is becoming increasingly advanced. For example, surgeons can now perform operations with much greater precision, and therapeutic vaccines are being developed to prompt the patient’s immune system to fight cancer. Work is also being done on better early diagnostics,…

The Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs of Leiden University in The Hague has developed a Serious Game, 'het Grote Migratiespel' to introduce secondary school students to their study and research programmes.

The aim of this project is to foster a historiography that does justice both to the realization that scientific knowledge is constructed by local, contingent, and contextual processes, and the claims of science to objective validity.

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

We will use Artificial Intelligence to make an intelligent, multilingual search engine for archaeological texts, which will enable new discoveries about the human past.

The research question is that unconscious perseverative cognition (UPC) is responsible for a considerable part of cardiovascular (CV) activity that occurs even in the absence of threats and other stressors that one may encounter in one’s daily life.

The starting point for this research project is the notion that the human brain is susceptible to all kinds of fallacies and biases that affect our perceptions and influence our reasoning outside of our conscious awareness. Indeed, most people think they are merely observing facts and that they process…

How do first-hand narratives of war of commanders in the front line relate to the official narrative of the Eighty Years’ War?

It has been found that the better a prisoner is treated, the more effective the sentence. Leiden criminologists therefore research how detention can be improved in such areas as prison life and contact between prisoners and their children.

Past objects offer a wealth of information about life in earlier times. Loe Jacobs is an expert in making earthenware objects, using the same methods and means used in earlier times.

Subproject of

Dr Kim Duistermaat (NVIC) en Niels Groot (TU Delft)

As a student in Security Studies you are a socially engaged critical thinker eager to study real-life security cases in an academic setting. You focus not just on the broad context of these issues but also on the role of government, institutions and media. Want to know more? Sign up for one of our Open…

To be eligible for Assyriology (research) at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

The International Bachelor in Psychology (IBP) offers a broad academic development, with knowledge of several subdisciplines, such as clinical (neuro)psychology, developmental psychology, social and organisational psychology, economic and consumer psychology, cognitive psychology and health psycholo…

To be eligible for Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (research) at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

Discover the admission requirements for the MSc in Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Development at Leiden University, including bachelor qualifications, ECTS prerequisites, and English language criteria.

To be eligible for Foundations of Computing at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Applied Archaeology at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Statistics & Data Science at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for European and International Business Law at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for Italian Literature and Culture at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

To be eligible for European and International Human Rights Law Law, you must meet the admission requirements as listed on this page.

To be eligible for International Children's Rights, you must meet the following admission requirements. Read more info about the admission requirements.

To be eligible for Life Science and Technology at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

A comparative study on the spatial origin and development of towns in the northern Netherlands, 700-1400.

To be eligible for Astronomy and Science Communication and Society at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.