Martijn Kitzen has been appointed professor by special appointment of Military Science at ISGA on behalf of the Royal Netherlands Society for War Studies (KVBK).

How does the brain develop from birth up to adolescence? And why are young people given so little information about the development of their brain? Two new websites of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition provide an answer.

Scientists have discovered that starlings and parrots can imitate the complex sounds of Star Wars droid R2-D2 remarkably well. Their study reveals how the structure of a bird’s vocal organ determines its vocal abilities – and how citizen science helps uncover it.

Do you often find yourself exhausted in the lecture hall or at your workplace? Not great for your mental well-being, as Laura Pape knows. She is investigating how an online self-help program can assist in addressing sleep issues and preventing mental health problems. Join her on this elevator pitch…

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

In the Dutch media lots of articles have recently appeared based on interviews with Eveline Crone about the adolescent brain.

Eveline Crone surmises that adolescence also has a positive effect on social development. She believes, for example, that it is in adolescence that young people learn the skills of cooperation, sharing and helpfulness. She will be researching this hypothesis in the coming period with an ERC Consolidator…

The Netherlands Association for Sleep-Wake Research is studying this issue. Lead researcher Kristiaan van der Heijden, Leiden psychologist and sleep specialist, invites students to take part in the study.

A long-term mathematical collaboration between South Africa and Leiden will continue with the appointment of Marcel de Jeu as professor by special appointment at the University of Pretoria. He will be working in the field of Positivity.

As of 1 May 2025, Professor Kartica van der Zon has been appointed professor by special appointment of Family Law, Law of Persons and Juvenile Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen.

PhD defence

Psychology graduates acquire skills useful in a variety of jobs. Whether helping people with mental disorders, researching the brain or deciding who should be hired at a company, psychologists can do it.

To be eligible for Creative Intelligence & Technology (previously Media Technology) at Leiden University, you must meet the following admission requirements.

On Sunday, November 9 2025, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey presented a film at the “Eastern Neighbors” Film Festival in The Hague.

On Tuesday November 25, 2025, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey traveled with students from her masters seminar on “New Approached to the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe” taught at the History Institute to Amsterdam for a unique opportunity. There, Ms. Lotte Sophie Groenendijk, an alum of the History…

Dementia is a progressive disease, diagnosed at a relatively late stage when intervention may not be effective. Aim of the research is to study scans of brain networks to help discover the early network changes related to dementia. Early diagnosis may benefit effectiveness of future treatment.

Open online education has become a highly popular method of education. The current project aims to further our knowledge of how open online courses can be best designed to be consistent with human learning mechanics and facilitate meaningful learning.

What is the difference between a minister saying that something is possible or that it is not impossible ?

Are the types of school non-attendance which have been evidenced in typically developing youth also found among children and adolescents with an intellectual disability (ID)? If so, which types are most prevalent and thus in greatest need of attention, and what factors (child, family, school/environmental)…

Although exposure therapy is the gold-standard treatment of posttraumatic stress-disorder (PTSD), only half of the patients adequately benefit from it. Based on recent insights into the mechanisms of extinction, this project examines strategies and techniques to improve exposure treatment outcome in…

Healthcare robots and AI is a project that investigates the legal and regulatory aspects of healthcare robot and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

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In this dissertation, the types of context Dutch speakers need to interpret the poly-interpretable word ergens ‘somewhere/anywhere’ are studied.

What are the behavioral, cognitive, and motivational consequences of decision reversibility?

What is the role of neuronal emotional reactivity in the intergenerational transmission of abuse?

Embedding ethical legal and societal aspects for responsible military AI.

Can a newly developed, app-based, personalized maintenance program enhance the effectiveness of the exposure-based one-session-treatment for children with a specific phobia?

Very generally speaking, this study aims at questioning and re-defining the mind-body epistemic problem within contemporary dance and art culture.

Dialogue is a multi-dimensional communication mechanism whose processes can only be examined by means of an interdisciplinary approach.

Explore philosophical research and education at the Leiden Institute for Philosophy. Our scholars study knowledge, ethics and existence, connecting classical and contemporary thought.

Operators in the Lexicon opens with an old chestnut: why are there no natural single word lexicalizations for negations of the propositional operator and and the predicate calculus operator all: why neither *nand nor *nall?

At LUCL we study almost all aspects of a wide range of African languages. From phonology to anthropological linguistics, from theoretical syntax to urban youth languages, we study it all.

Our mission is to advance the understanding of mental health of individuals with a history of stress and/or trauma through rigorous interdisciplinary research, integrating insights from clinical psychology, neurobiology, and social sciences. We are committed to translating our findings into innovative…

This project looks at how the native language influences processing mechanisms of non-native language(s) as well has how it influences brain structure and functional connectivity.

The company Azafaros was established in 2018 to translate innovative science from Leiden University and Amsterdam University Medical Center into novel disease-modifying treatment modalities for rare genetic metabolic disorders such as lysosomal storage diseases.

Petra van der Bekerom, Joris van der Voet, and Johan Christensen, three assistant professors at Leiden University, conducted a large-scale survey experiment about whether citizens are more negative about failing service delivery than private organizations.

The Leiden Institute of Education and Child Studies aims to conduct high-quality research that addresses major social issues. This inspires its BSc, MSc and PhD programmes.

This thesis describes the use of the evolutionary approach in the study of language change, aiming to provide a better insight in the mechanisms that play a role in language change and to validate this approach in the field of language change.

Does an Emotional Working Memory Training show a beneficial transfer effect on emotion regulation (reappraisal) capacities in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder?

Across many decision-making tasks, people and animals systematically repeat (or alternate) their choices - even when the choices they make are intrinsically uncorrelated. This phenomenon (also known as 'sequential effect' or 'choice hysteresis') has been known for at least a century, and may be a stable…