As of 1 January, Wouter Kalf has been appointed Education Director at the Institute for Philosophy.

The opening of the Service Centre for International Staff on 19 January signals a higher level of support for international staff. The Service Centre in the main administration building at Rapenburg 70 will be open every morning, ready to answer any questions.

David van Bodegom, Professor of Vitality in an Ageing Population, will give his inaugural lecture on 11 November, also titled Vitality in an Ageing Population. According to Van Bodegom the key to healthy ageing is the lived environment. In the fight against lifestyle-related conditions, he therefore…

On May 15th, from 15.15 to 17.00 in the Vossiusroom, Leiden University Libraries will host a program on web-archiving and digital archives of Chinese communities in the Netherlands and Indonesia.

With the aid of artificial intelligence (AI), care professionals at the LUMC (Leiden University Medical Center) are able to calculate quickly and accurately whether a coronavirus patient has suffered serious lung damage. They do this by putting a CT scan through the AI software of the CAD4COVID-CT p…

A cultural delegation from Taiwan has presented 175 books and journals to Leiden University. The gift is meant as thanks for all the research carried out by the university on the subject of the indigenous peoples of Formosa, as Taiwan was called in the past.

It is theoretically possible that habitable planets exist around pulsars, rotating neutron stars. Such planets must have an enormous atmosphere that convert the deadly X-rays and high energy particles of the pulsar into heat. That is stated in a scientific paper by astronomers Alessandro Patruno and…

After an extensive content analysis of the coalition agreement, a sharp fall can be seen in the focus on education & culture, science & technology and defence. This is the conclusion of university public administration professors Gerard Breeman and Arco Timmermans. They compared the content with all…

After graduating from Leiden University College The Hague, our students spread out all over the world to continue their studies, do an internship or already start a job. Every other week we will catch up with one of our alumni and put them in the spotlight. They will share their LUC experience and talk…

The number of women in the Netherlands dying before, during or after childbirth has halved.

Leiden physicists and international colleagues from Geneva and Barcelona have confirmed the mechanism that makes magic-angle graphene superconducting. This is a key step in elucidating high-temperature superconductivity, a decades-old mystery central to physics, which may lead to technological break…

A new student-curated exhibition in the F1-corridor of the Van Steenis building brings history to life through remarkable finds from the Amsterdam, a merchant vessel of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) that met an untimely end in 1749. 'The story of the Amsterdam is truly unique, especially considering…

The Economist published an article about a working paper about the effects of democratic elections on satisfaction with democracy. The paper was written by Dimiter Koshkov, Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration and Honorata Mazepus, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security…

An NWO Veni application by Linda Geven, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, has been honoured. She will spend the next three years conducting research into false confessions in police interrogations.

The Military Information and Security Service (MIVD) prevented a Russian hacker attack on the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. Scientists Paul Abels, Willemijn Aerts, Constant Hijzen and Sergei Boeke of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs responded to…

Biologists today have to be able to work with big data. Data analysis skills should be taught from the start of the degree programme, or - even better - in secondary school. This is the message of Vera van Noort, new Professor of Computational Biology. Inaugural lecture 22 January.

Researchers in Bilthoven, The Netherlands, have recently unraveled the defense against whooping cough bacteria in unprecedented detail. The outcome of the project, conducted at Intravacc (Institute for Translational Vaccinology) in Bilthoven, provides opportunities for a new approach in the development…

Starting 1 September, Suzy Sirks-Bong will be appointed as the Director of Operational Management of the Faculty of Humanities Faculty Board. She will succeed Menno Tuurenhout, who has been on the Board since 2015. The Director of Operational Management is responsible for financial management and 'staff…

A suitcase covered with stickers from various universities, containing a quantum light source. Since April 2024, this suitcase has been visiting scientists in Europe researching single photons: the smallest possible quantity of light. The suitcase, also called ‘Q-torch’, travels from lab to lab like…

By making smart use of available data, the health and care of people can be substantially improved. Marco Spruit wants to use language and machine learning in the coming years to identify and solve the biggest care issues in the region of The Hague. He has been appointed Professor of Advanced Data Science…

In the new board game Epoch – Early Inventors you explore the prehistoric landscape. You gather food and raw material to develop tools and skills, and you try to appease the gods. Dr Maikel Kuijpers was involved in its development from the start and he is very happy with the result. “There is a lot…

Canal Cups, Auke-Florian Hiemstra and Liselotte Rambonnet’s project to rid Leiden of disposable plastic cups and its canals of litter, has taken 59th place in Trouw newspaper’s Top 100 sustainable initiatives.

Neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, are characterised by aggregates of protein in the brain. The connection of these aggregates to the disease itself is unclear. Martina Huber, Enrico Zurlo and colleagues published a new method to monitor the formation of these aggregates.

Book publication 'Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance' marks the 20th anniversary of the Orpheus Institute..

Ludo Waltman has been appointed as professor of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, especially Quantitative Science Studies, at Leiden University. The chair is located at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS).

Is polder rice a feasible circular alternative for cows on peatland? A pilot experiment started this week. On May 22nd, researchers from Leiden University and Wageningen University & Research (WUR) planted roughly 3,000 rice plants on the Polderlab near Leiden. The researchers want to test rice as a…

Many poor people in Indonesia mainly rely on their family members, neighbours and the local community as a social safety net. One of the forms of aid from the community is called ‘jimpitan’ in Central Java. PhD candidate Ayu Swaningrum researched how this social security system works.

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Leiden University and Philips are jointly receiving over 2 million euros from NWO to set up an artificial intelligence (AI) lab. The aim of this lab is to accelerate and improve MRI scans with AI. This is great for patients, and it helps make MRI more accessi…

On 22 August, the GO-FAIR IN Africa was launched: an implementation network under the GO FAIR efforts to train, build and change the next generation of the Internet of FAIR Data and Services (IFDS).

Political scientist Wouter Veenendaal (Leiden University) has been awarded a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This enables him to further develop his innovative line of research on and set up a research group in the coming five years. Veenendaal et al. will analyse the democratic consequences…

Samen met andere studenten bracht Fien Lurvink hulpgoederen naar Oekraïne en nam vluchtelingen mee terug.

Envoys jumping out of windows, fights, and illegal diplomacy: history student Tessa de Boer encountered them all while writing her master's thesis on Amsterdam as a diplomatic city during the 17th and 18th centuries. For her thesis, she was awarded the Uitgeverij Verloren/Johan de Witt thesis prize…

In recent decades, a more radical Islam has been on the rise in Indonesia, but the government now promotes a moderate form of Islam. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Nico Kaptein will analyse the dynamics of Islam and the influence of the Middle East in this the largest Muslim country in the world.…

Three Leiden astronomers have shown that some asteroids that are considered harmless for now, can collide with Earth in the future. They did their research with the help of an artificial neural network. The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Diana Dávila Gordillo, PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science does field trips to her native Ecuador.

We are very happy to announce that as of 1 March Marleen De Meyer is our new NVIC Director!

On 28 December 2019, Dutch newspaper Trouw published an essay by Constant Hijzen, Assistant Professor Intelligence Studies at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and the Institute for History. In the essay, he discusses two books on a new genre of espionage: the authors provide access into…

Eight major scientific consortia are to receive research investment funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO. Leiden University is involved in all these project and is the lead applicant for four of the awards.

Medical drugs are expensive to make and can have an adverse effect on the environment. Researchers Stefano Cucurachi and Justin Lian have developed a framework to help the healthcare system assess the economic and environmental sustainability of medical compounds.

The Italian physicist Andrea Morello is one of the pioneers of the quantum revolution. He is currently doing research at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, but cherishes his time as a PhD candidate in Leiden.

The METIS instrument that’s being built for ESO's future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Northern Chile under the leadership of the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has reached an important milestone: the preliminary design has been approved.

Four scientists from the Faculty of Science will receive a grant of up to 50,000 euros in the Open Competition Domain Science - XS from science financier NWO. This category emphatically strives to encourage curiosity-driven and bold research involving a relatively quick analysis of a promising idea.…

Philosopher Stefan Buijsman obtained his doctorate this year at the age of 20 at the University of Stockholm, making him the youngest PhD in Sweden. He was already taking lectures in Astronomy in Leiden when he was 12, and at 15 he started a degree programme in Information Technology. 'The first reaction…

Two research projects focused on democracy and citizen collectives have been awarded grants through the 2024 round of the National Science Agenda’s (NWA) ‘Onderzoek op Routes door Consortia (ORC)’. Each project will receive around €6.8 million to get started immediately.

After many years of preparations, CERN has approved a groundbreaking new experiment: the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP). Physicist Alexey Boyarsky was involved from the start. ‘We know there is physics that’s missing and we aim to find it.’

Farmers on the outskirts of Nairobi National Park protect their livestock using flashing lights on top of the animal enclosures. This system keeps lions away at night. Leiden research has shown that the method is both simple and effective. Publication in PLOS ONE.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an exceptional two-volume Miao album. The acquisition was made possible by the Rombouts Fund for Chinese collections. The extraordinarily well-preserved work contains 70 full-page paintings on silk, depicting non-Chinese peoples in the area…

In 2013, Thijs Porck wrote a guest blog for 'medievalfragments'...

Hundreds of new students at Leiden University attended the opening of the 2015-2016 academic year. They came from all corners of the world for the start of their new study programme. Portraits of some of the newcomers.

Charles Darwin received an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University on 9 February 1875. What traces did he leave behind in Leiden?