Developing a digital guest lecture for high school students. Jan Sleutels was immediately enthusiastic when he got asked to do this. The end result? Together with his colleague Maarten Lamers, he created the guest lecture 'Thinking about Artificial Intelligence'.

The Dutch Student Orchestra is performing at Stadsgehoorzaal, Leiden’s concert hall, on 11 February. Several Leiden students have sacrificed many a free hour to the rehearsals. Days before the big performance we present them with three dilemmas.

Although coeliac disease, an autoimmune disorder that makes you gluten intolerant, occurs in 1% of the population, its diagnosis is often delayed or completely overlooked. To prevent health problems, this must change. That is what Professor of Paediatrics Luisa Mearin said at her inaugural lecture on…

All first-year bachelor’s students at Leiden will be assigned a student as a mentor and a lecturer as a tutor to help them find their way around their new city and degree programme. The tutor groups, with ten to fifteen students, will also give students the chance to get to know one another.

Leiden astronomy Master's student Arend Moerman has received an A+ for his thesis research on the simulation of chaotic interactions of three black holes. The simulations, which he carried out together with his Leiden and Oxford colleagues, show that lighter black holes tend to slingshot each other…

The end of January arrived together with welcome guests from Saxion University of Applied Sciences. As a part of their two-day-long visit to South Holland, almost 100 Saxion archaeology students visited our Faculty.

Leiden University is a member of the Una Europa European alliance. This partnership of 11 research-intensive universities is working to shape the university of the future.

The Faculty of Science has reinforced the collaboration in China during a group trip late November. Representatives from four institutes visited ten Chinese top universities and interviewed over 130 students in PhD workshops in Beijing and Shanghai.

The Casimir Research School is to receive an € 800,000 subsidy from the NWO Graduate Programme to further integrate the master's study and PhD research. Minister Plasterk judged the Leiden-Delft Casimir plan to be one of the best.

How does language work and how do we learn a language? The more we know about language, the better we can understand how people interpret the world in words. Roberta D'Alessandro carries out research on the architecture of language. There is now a dossier about her work online.

The Jaap Doek Children’s rights thesis award is an annual award for the best thesis in the field of Children’s Rights granted by Defence for Children and the Department of Child Law of the Leiden Law School. This year the thesis award will be presented for the fourth time.

Tracking mucus-eating bacteria, mapping the complexity of planetary nebulae and a signalling pathway in cancer. These three Leiden projects have been awarded Open Competition Science-M funding by the Dutch Research Council.

Konstantinos Zoumpoulakis, Research Assistant at the Institute of Criminal Law & Criminology, has written a report on this conference

Researchers at Leiden University have been awarded a €4 million EU grant to develop climate-neutral fuels. With this money they will expand the broad research community that focuses on green energy. If we work together, we can make the rapid progress that is needed, says Prof. Huub de Groot, Professor…

How did Google's computer programme AlphaGo become so powerful? On June 29, developer Aja Huang elaborated on this during a lecture in the Gorlaeus building.

Museums have long focused on power, wealth and a few famous figures. But that is changing, says Valika Smeulders, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum. What this change comprises and how it has come about is the subject of her keynote speech at the D&I Symposium on 11 January.

Researchers have spent years looking for the ‘missing link’ between wolves and dogs. But many of the domesticated dogs that had been found prove to have been wolves after all. This is what vet and archaeologist Luc Janssens says in his dissertation. PhD defence on 27 June.

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

Leiden scientists will be working on the development of a camera for the European Extremely Large Telescope that is currently under construction. On 28 September the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy signed an agreement with the European Southern Observatory.

Martin van Hecke and Lennard Kwakernaak (Leiden university and AMOLF) develop a mechanical metamterial that can count to ten in their research.

Jacques J. M. van Gent (8 June 1932 - 26 March 2021) was director of Leiden University Library from 1983 to 1993. He was librarian in a time of transition and, as director, was able to benefit from the new library building on the Witte Singel. Van Gent was a very different kind of manager from his predecessor,…

As Director-General of the ESO for the past ten years, Leiden University astronomer Tim de Zeeuw had ‘the best astronomy job in the world’. Back at the Leiden Observatory, he is focusing on the first 3D map of the Milky Way.

Developing a digital guest lecture for high school students. Jan Sleutels was immediately enthusiastic when he got asked to do this. The end result? Together with his colleague Maarten Lamers, he created the guest lecture 'Thinking about Artificial Intelligence'.

Marcia Brandenburg, PhD candidate at Clinical Child and Adolescent Studies in Leiden, is the winner of the Dutch final of the science communication competition FameLab. She will represent the Netherlands in the final.

On Monday 28 September, the University Council (UR) will discuss the Development Strategy and the Implementation Plan for Leiden University's Campus The Hague 2020-2030. The plan will then be put on the agenda of the meeting of the UR with the Executive Board on 12 October. After this, the plans for…

Michiel Veldhuis received the most public votes for the C.J. Kok Public Award and may therefore call himself Discoverer of the Year. Veldhuis researches how climate change affects savannah ecosystems in Africa and how we can protect them.

During the 20th anniversary meeting of the Netherlands' Catalysis and Chemistry Conference, Marc Koper received the Netherlands Catalysis and Chemistry Award. ‘The ultimate candidate for the prize’, it says in one of the recommendation letters.

For the first time, astronomers have observed in three dimensions that gas from spiral galaxies is blown upwards and downwards at high speed, far out of the galaxy. They thereby confirm the theory of galaxy evolution: that star-forming galaxies create intergalactic gas flows by discharging gas along…

On Thursday 3 November Leiden University will celebrate the official opening of two wall formulas in the city centre. As of now, Snell’s law and the Lorentz force formula shine on two walls in the heart of Leiden. They are part of a project to display at least ten groundbreaking formulas with a Leiden…

Sander van Kasteren (Professor of Molecular Immunology) makes the invisible visible. He will explain more in his inaugural lecture.

Astronomer Frans Snik searches for extraterrestrial life. He doesn’t so much look at stars as at the ‘exoplanets’ alongside them.

More than 60 European researchers and industry partners have set out their roadmap for the application of graphene in marketed products. Leiden chemist Grégory F. Schneider believes that graphene and other layered materials can in the future be used for DNA sequencing applications.

30 July is the International Day of Friendship. The student years are a time when many close friendships are formed, and a surprising number of them last a whole lifetime. Two of our alumni share their stories about a special friendship.

With his knowledge of medicine and his decisive action, Leiden professor Sebald Justinus Brugmans saved the lives of many wounded soldiers after the Battle of Waterloo, on 18 June 2015 exactly 200 years ago.

Land van Ons, a cooperation that buys agricultural land for the restoration of biodiversity and landscape, and Leiden University join forces. Together, they will investigate over a longer period of time which agricultural management leads to the best restoration of biodiversity. The research will start…

Last year, Dr. Henk van Steenbergen received a Grass Shoot grant to completely redevelop the research master's course 'Experimentation I: Programming Psychological Experiments'. The revised course was taught for first time last block and has just come to an end. Time for a brief recap.

From a billionaires’ space race to the launch of tens of thousands of minisatellites: space is becoming busier than ever. This means more than enough work for Tanja Masson-Swaan, an assistant professor at the Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University. Because who makes the rules and makes…

A research team from Leiden University, in cooperation with Bureau Boekhoorn Sociaal-Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek en Advies (BBSO), is to evaluate Dutch counterterrorism legislation.

More than 100 teachers, educators and policymakers from 25 countries gathered in Leiden from 18 October for the Space Education International Workshop. Their goal is to inspire children using astronomy and space sciences.

Do all graduates in the humanities pursue a career in education? What does support for incoming students look like in Leiden? And what makes a language study so enjoyable? These and more questions were answered during an information session organised specially for twenty deans from West Brabant.

Leiden University has taken eighth place in the UI Green Metric, a global sustainability ranking for universities. Over 900 universities from all round the world participated in the ranking.

“Het is niet genoeg dat Amerika aanwezig is in de ruimte. Amerika moet domineren”, zegt Donald Trump tijdens een bijeenkomst met de Nationale Ruimteraad. Zodoende wil hij naast de land-, zee-, en luchtmacht een nieuwe militaire kracht oprichten: de Space Force. Ruimterecht deskundige Tanja Masson denkt…

There are frequent calls from society for heavier prison sentences, but the question is whether longer sentences result in a safer society. Judges are seeing more and more offenders with social and psychological problems and they therefore often prescribe a programme of treatment and monitoring for…

LUMC researcher Marius Staring will receive a $ 200,000 grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to improve the accessibility, interoperability and efficiency of the Elastix imaging software. This will give the popular 2003 software package a much-needed new impulse.

The deadline for applications for the NISIS Autumn School has been extended until Monday 24 September 2018, 9.00 hours (CET)!!

Ninety young researchers who recently obtained a doctorate can apply for a post-doc position in the LEaDing Fellows Postdocs Programme from 1 February.

After more than ten years, the time has come. The new Dutch Open Government Act (Wet Openbaar Overheid, Woo) will take effect on 1 May 2022. The Woo replaces the Government Information (Public Access) Act (Wob). The aim of the Act is to get administrative bodies of the government in the Netherlands…

Annually KNVI (Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging van Informatieprofessionals) awards thesis prizes to master students in the field of Informatics and Information Science.

The annual Orpheus Doctoral Conference, organised by the second year docARTES PhD students, will take place on 28 and 29 May 2020. The call for proposals is now open. Proposals for presentations of any kind are welcomed: from scholarly papers to performances.

The German government recently asked the European Central Bank to account for a programme that already ended. Gerrit Dijkstra, assistant professor at Leiden University, wrote an opinion piece for de Volkskrant about how this tick is a sign of a new collision course.