Swarms of drones, pedestrians or the cells in your body. Those are all examples of active matter: materials whose building blocks can move autonomously. That’s what Luca Giomi studies. Giomi has been appointed Professor of theoretical physics in the area of soft matter and biological physics at the…

Prof.dr. Rozenberg, emeritus professor in Theoretical Computer Science at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), received a royal decoration from the deputy mayor of Leiden on December 15th 2017. He has been appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.

The research Early Pleistocene human occupation at the edge of the boreal zone in northwest Europe published 8th July 2010 in Nature is part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project, in which the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University is involved.

Fish populations in lakes and rivers have declined in recent decades. This is probably due to light and noise pollution. The Horizon Europe grant enables ecologist Hans Slabbekoorn to investigate this and improve the situation for migrating fish. In order to do so, a seven-metre-long swimming tunnel…

Smart drug carriers, uneven cosmic expansion, and solar energy storage in molecules. These are the topics of three newly awarded NWO-XS grants to researchers at the Faculty of Science.

Ambroise Paré, Thomas Sydenham and Herman Boerhaave: all were great medical innovators in their time. We know far less about the 19th-century Russian physician and scientist Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. PhD candidate Inge Hendriks researched him in Dutch and Russian archives and collections. She discovered…

This Thursday, January 18th 2024, our esteemed colleague Jan Zaanen passed away. Jan was one of our star scientists, larger than life, with an unabashed, boisterous drive for the best of physics at the Institute Lorentz, at the Leiden Institute of Physics and in the full international scientific community.…

From chilling on the beach to a speech by the mayor. HOPweek is a speedy way for hundreds of ‘Leiden’ students who are going to be studying in The Hague to get to know each other. Many of them come from abroad. ‘I actually dare to cycle here.’

Not all problems are easy to solve, but with enough bright minds, you make progress step by step. ‘The kind of problems I am interested in have been occupying mathematicians for over two millennia,’ says theoretical mathematician David Lilienfeldt. In September, he started at the Mathematical Institute…

Electrochemist Marc Koper has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euros for research into chemical reactions driven by electrodes and electricity. He hopes that new insights will make it into the textbooks and help design green processes, such as making fuel from greenhouse gas.

From political confessions to life lessons from his own student time. On 14 March, Prime Minister Mark Rutte gave candid answers to questions from Leiden law students.

For his PhD project, computer scientist Manolis Fragkiadakis is developing a tool that can compare videos of sign language corpora. This would make it possible to detect differences between sign languages and prevent translation errors. Ultimately, the tool could be used to compare sign languages from…

The housing crisis is affecting a substantial group of Dutch citizens and is one of the main election themes this year. How did things get this far and what should the new cabinet do in the coming four years to address the problems? Three Leiden researchers give their answer.

Coming four years after part II, and totalling more than one thousand pages, the long awaited first part of the Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), daughter of James I, King of England and Scotland has been published.

For 25 years now, each faculty has had an assessor, a student representing the interests of all the faculty’s students. Yet few students are aware of this.

With the retirement of Wil Roebroeks, Gerrit Dusseldorp will take his place as the archaeological representative in the Liveable Planet Interdisciplinary Programme as an Associate Professor. An expert on the behaviour of early human hunter-gatherers, he will look at the interaction between humans and…

The life of a students is not always easy and many students find it difficult to share their problems with each other. For that reason, the study advisers and coordinators of studies of Campus The Hague organise the symposium OpenUp!. This event was awarded with the Van Bergen Prize.

‘You are the last generation that will have an effective influence on the future of the world.' This was the message given by guest speaker Maurits Groen to the 135 students who graduated at Leiden University College in The Hague on 6 July.

An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore. Archaeologist Alex Brandsen has now used deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to develop a search engine…

As Scaliger professor, Erik Kwakkel is responsible for the academic context of the complete Special Collections of the Leiden University Library. His inaugural lecture on 15 May will focus mainly on the section closest to his heart: Medieval books.

Professor Ann Skelton has been elected as Chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Rotterdam is an extreme example of inequality in the Netherlands. There are huge health and life expectancy differences between neighbourhoods. Good access to healthcare and education isn’t a cure-all, say inequality economists Lieke Beekers and Hans van Kippersluis

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Lecture

For most of the past ten years, Europe has been in a state of ‘crisis’. The bank crisis mutated seamlessly via the Euro crisis to the present migrant crisis. Whereas previously the general assumption was that even closer cooperation within the European Union was a foregone conclusion, the EU is now…

A certain type of oil droplets changes shape when cooled and shrunk: from spherical through icosahedral to flat hexagonal. Two competing theories couldn't fully explain this, but now, a Physical Review Letter by Ireth García-Aguilar and Luca Giomi solves the mystery.

PhD candidates in medicine, Wouter Jan Geelhoed and Nan van Geloven, are the winners of the Leiden preliminary round of FameLab. They are through to the final on 22 April.

You’re about to start your minor at Leiden University. Make sure you are well prepared and get your studies off to a good start.

What is dark matter? How do supermassive black holes form? ‘Primordial’ black holes might hold the answer to these long-standing questions. Leiden and Chinese cosmologists have identified a new way in which these hypothetical objects could be produced just after the Big Bang. Publication in Physical…

Neighbourhood newspapers, newsletters and Facebook groups: Leiden residents have dozens of ways to keep each other informed about news in their neighbourhood. Students from the pre-master's programme in Journalism and New Media mapped out all these different media and asked themselves: what is the future…

A large research group involving Leiden University as corresponding Host Institution has been awarded a major European grant, the ERC Synergy Grant. This for research on how Europe developed after the fall of the Roman Empire with special attention to the yet underexplored but undoubtedly important…

Medicines are becoming increasingly precise and innovative, but at the same time increasingly expensive. With their innovations, it is up to universities to increase competition, thus causing prices to drop. This is what newly appointed Professor of Biomolecular Analysis Hubertus Irth argues. His inaugural…

Jeroen Wolbers is Assistant Professor of Crisis Governance at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. In the coming 4 years, Jeroen will study command tactics during sudden-onset crisis operations with his Veni grant. He will investigate how crisis managers can deal with fr…

More than a thousand 17th- and 18th-century Dutch letters from seized ships are now available online. The letters are a gold mine for researchers wanting to study the everyday language used by men and women during this period.

Hardly ever before have different groups in the population retreated into their own bubble as much as they are doing today. Professor of Sociology and Law Maartje van der Woude and her students will be examining the effect of social distancing on relationships. How do the people of Leiden look at students…

In collaboration with the The Hague Historical Museum and photographer Dagmar van Weeghel, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) is the first to present a retrospective exhibition of the photographic oeuvre of Alexine Tinne (1835 – 1869). New research into her life and work is the reason for a reappraisal…

All comets might share their place of birth, new research says. For the first time ever, astronomer Christian Eistrup applied chemical models to fourteen well-known comets, surprisingly finding a clear pattern. His publication has been accepted in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The current and future board of F.D.L. Gibalaux, the study association of the French language and culture programme, talk about the association, the change of board, their experiences and plans.

Leiden University is involved in five new NWO Gravitation projects. Two relate to mental disorder and the remaining three to a healthy lifestyle, the combination of human and artificial intelligence, and the special relationship between plants and microbes.

Studying law and then working in sales … Dion Latten loves Leiden and he loves law, but what he loves most is working for BMW. Currently Legal Counsel at BMW, he’ll soon be joining the sales team. ‘Don’t be swayed by the fear of making the wrong choices.’

Governments have increasing amounts of data at their disposal. How can big data be used in policymaking? And are governments ready to deal with all this data? That is what Sarah Giest, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, is interested in.