Security and safety challenges are at the top of the list of the most pressing issues of contemporary society.

Leiden University College The Hague again receives the 'Top rated Programme' seal from the Keuzegids Universiteiten 2019 (Dutch University Guide).

Last week Russia and Ukraine met for the first time since the outbreak of the war. The talks took place in Belarus.

In a Leiden Law Blog, lab member Niek Strohmaier and Marc Broekema describe how their research on valuation biases was used by the Delaware Court of Chancery in a recent valuation dispute involving telecom giant AT&T.

Lecture

Leiden chemist Marc Koper is the winner of the 2017 Faraday Medal for his significant contribution to electrochemistry, from fundamental science to practical application.

The peer-reviewed article by Salvador Santino Regilme, titled “Crisis Politics of Dehumanisation during COVID-19: A Framework for Mapping the Social Processes through which Dehumanisation Undermines Human Dignity,” has been named as a finalist for the John Peterson Best Paper Prize 2023 by The British…

This week the European Commission took a major step by starting infringement proceedings against the United Kingdom. The issue at stake is the contentious Internal Market Bill introduced by Boris Johnson’s government which is contrary to the Brexit Agreement.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have for the first time detected dimethyl ether in a planet-forming disc. With nine atoms, this is the largest molecule identified in such a disc to date. It is also a precursor…

The 20th anniversary of the Lorentz Center will be celebrated on 28 June 2017 with the opening of an exhibition in the Oude UB. For two decades already, the Center has been a place of retreat for groups of international academics who want to explore a single issue.

Leiden researchers have developed a groundbreaking model to advance cancer immunotherapy. Using a 3D printer, they create mini-tumors within an environment that closely mimics human tissue. They have also developed a method to monitor real-time interactions of these mini-tumours with immune cells during…

Dr Alex Geurds was elected as a Fellow for the Society of Antiquaries, a prestigious and old educational charity based in London. Established in 1707, the society aims at the encouragement and advancement of the study and knowledge of the antiquities.

Local perceptions, attachments and knowledge are often not considered in the methodology of archaeology when researching a site, argues PhD-candidate Tomomi Fushiya. She proposes a broader integration of local perceptions in an archaeological narrative. PhD-defence on December 2.

Inaugural lecture

Kiem project: How can metaphors be used to enhance societal engagement with quantum science and technology, and what factors influence their acceptance or resistance among experts and laypeople?

Les Cottés is one the rare site in western Europe with occupations in sequence by the very last Neandertals and the first anatomically modern humans.

The Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University ran an excavation project in Northern Syria, at Tell Hammam al Turkman, some 80 km north of Raqqa. The Faculty of Archaeology and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research N.W.O. finance the undertaking, which is directed by dr Diederik J.W.…

Young Academy Leiden (YAL) will change its board this month and welcome six new members. Outgoing chair Rachel Plak and incoming chair Ahmed Mahfouz talk about what the platform has achieved for young academics over the past year and what the plans are for the future.

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.…

How do you progress from an immense gas cloud somewhere in the universe to a star with planets? Research by Astronomy PhD student Martijn van Gelder sheds more light on the earliest phases of this process. He will receive his doctorate on November 24th.

The Indonesian government has been trying to enforce marriage and divorce laws for some time. These efforts are encountering resistance from both local communities and the Indonesian Supreme Court. PhD candidate Al Farabi investigated where this resistance comes from.

Chemist Liubov Belyaeva, psychologist Janna Marie Bas-Hoogendam and LUMC researcher Elisa Giacomelli have received a Rubicon Grand and will therefore be able to conduct research at a top institution abroad.

Children are not always immediately helped due to staff shortages. For years, youth protection agencies have used an emergency protocol. Mariëlle Bruning, Professor of Children and the Law in ‘Trouw’: ‘It’s shocking that an emergency protocol has been used for three years.’

De Raad van Advies bestaat uit leden die een binding hebben met de faculteit. Daarnaast zijn zij goed thuis in de wereld van de advocatuur, de rechterlijke macht, de overheid en het bedrijfsleven. Het faculteitsbestuur gebruikt de adviezen van de Raad van Advies bij de beleidsontwikkeling van de faculteit…

China is a one-party regime, yet elections are held for the local congresses. PhD candidate Wang Zhongyuan investigated how the Communist Party uses this democratic instrument to strengthen the authoritarian regime. PhD defence 31 January.

‘Leiden is small, friendly and welcoming,’ says new first-year student Ayla Russel. Strong wind and heavy showers were forecast for the first in-person day of the EL CID on 16 August, which could easily have spoiled this impression. But fortunately the showers – apart from one – fell somewhere else,…

Iris Wuisman and Morshed Mannan of the Company Law department attended a European workshop on blockchain and the law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence on 30 November 2017- 1 December 2017.

The Leiden Centre of Science and Techonology Studies has developed 10 principles that are intended to guide the responsible use of university rankings.

On December 3, Erik Kwakkel (University of British Columbia) will give a lecture in the University Library Leiden, titled “Writing on the Wall: Medieval Advertisement Sheets in Perspective.” Professional scribes in the Middle Ages produced advertisement sheets with which they presented themselves to…

The Europa Instituut of the University of Leiden and the British Institute of International and Comparative Law annually organize a conference to discuss current developments in European Union Law.

These are trying times for Ukraine. The armed conflicts with Russia in Donbass and Crimea have still not come to an end after starting in 2014. Ukranian minister of Foreign Affairs Pavlo Klymkin came to The Hague on February 2nd to discuss these current issues with Leiden students. ‘Ukranians will always…

Dr. Mark Dechesne, associate professor at the Leiden University Dual PhD Centre (FGGA) will participate asas work package leader in a large new international project on radicalization among young people in Europe.

Psychologen laten zich horen over de plannen om de internationale bacheloropleidingen op te heffen in de Randstad en Tilburg. Het inititatief #Ikbeneenpsycholoog van Judith Schomaker op LinkedIn vindt navolging. Lees een selectie van de posts en ook het blog van Eiko Fried over de consequenties.

El X Congreso Internacional, Transhispanismos: contactos y contagios, es gratuito para oyentes sin ponencia.

Ya se acerca el X Congreso Internacional Transhispanismos: contactos y contagios, que se llevará a cabo en las ciudades de Leiden (1, 2 y 3 de Octubre), y La Haya (4 de Octubre).

Cecily Rose, Assistant Professor at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, has been involved in informing media reports about the recent provisional measures order delivered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Gambia v Myanmar case.

An international team led by Leiden astronomers has discovered diverse ices in the darkest, coldest regions of a molecular cloud. To do so, they used the James Webb Space Telescope. This discovery allows astronomers to examine the simple icy molecules that will be incorporated into future exoplanets,…

The NVIC and al-Azhar University signed a protocol for cooperation on the 23rd of September 2018. The protocol formalizes cooperation between al-Azhar as the oldest Islamic university and the Dutch and Flemish universities in the scope of humanities and Islamic and Arabic studies. The NVIC will act…

De Europese Unie bekijkt mogelijkheden om geblokkeerde Russische tegoeden aan te wenden ter ondersteuning van Oekraïne. Joris Larik, universitair hoofddocent Europees en internationaal recht, duidt de zaak in een interview voor Al Jazeera.

Light can be used to apply forces on single cells. Focused lasers have been used by physicists to tweeze particles and to manipulate them. These so called “optical tweezers” can be used as mechanical phenotyping tools for characterising the mechanics of materials and living objects.

On Tuesday, December 9 2025, Prof. Koen Ottenheyn delivered the last Austria Centre lunch talk of 2025. Prof. Ottenheyn serves as a professor of architectural history at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Academic Curatorium which advises…

This programme aims to identify the intellectual contexts that were of importance for the architectural theory of the period, and especially to clarify the relation of architectural theory to primitivism.

Uniting an international consortium of scholars, the Skandapurāṇa Project comprises a team of researchers working in fields across the Humanities. We are creating a critical edition of a foundational work of purāṇic literature and, in doing so, tracing the dynamics of a textual tradition to better understand…

According to a number of British historians, the elderly had a particularly high status in the early Middle Ages. A new book by Leiden cultural historian Thijs Porck sheds a different light on the matter: elderly people had to earn that respect first, and old age was often described in negative terms…

In countries with complex domestic situations, citizens have little opportunity to exercise influence on governance and policy. Leiden academics research these situations and share their insights with the public, such as in Nigeria for instance. This enables the people and their communities to improve…

The people behind The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and its online platform.

Can dynamic testing provide us with insight in children’s potential for learning?

For a long time, the painful history of colonial slavery received too little attention. People whose ancestors lived in slavery are now asking critical questions about how we should address that past. Leiden University researchers study the history of colonialism and slavery and their long-term impact…