About the book

Martijn Bezemer has been appointed as professor in “Ecology of plant-microbe-insect interactions” within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology from the 1st of September 2016. His main research focus is on aboveground-belowground interactions.

At this week’s EU summit in Brussels, Dutch Prime Minister Rutte will try to get support for his plans to combat migration. He proposes tighter border controls at Europe’s external borders and returning rejected seekers to their country of origin more often. But how feasible is the latter proposal?

Leiden Biology student Bregje Brinkmann received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2014 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.

For the fourth time in a row, the Dutch University Selection Guide labelled the Leiden bachelor’s programme Mathematics as ‘Excellent’. Director of education Floske Spieksma: ‘Together we make this programme a success. It is good to see that our efforts are rewarded again.’

Over the past few months, students and staff from the Faculty of Humanities have produced many wonderful podcasts - perfect for listening during a long walk or while preparing the Christmas dinner.

'Don’t Let the sunny weather fool you' a film made by Visual Ethnography alumna Guusje Meeuwissen has been selected for the RAI film festival in London this year. It's a short film about the everyday lives of a farmer and a fisherman in the Philippines, and their capacity to adapt to a changing natural…

The KNAW Early Career Award 2019 has been awarded to lecturer in children’s rights Stephanie Rap. She receives the award for her research into international children's rights.

Bright explosions appear all over the radio and gravitational-wave sky. This dynamic side of the universe which has just been discovered, can be mapped by self-learning machines. The National Science Agenda granted 5 million euro’s to CORTEX, the Center for Optimal, Real-Time Machine Studies of the…

Will Leiden be the first city to have wall poems in sign language? It will, if sign language researcher Victoria Nyst has her way. She recently started a crowdfunding campaign together with the Leiden Language Museum and the TEGEN-BEELD Foundation.

The Institute of Environmental Sciences of the Leiden University has, together with its European partners, presented the new MULTIPLY platform, during a workshop at the European Space Agency (ESA). This platform makes it for the first time possible to combine different data stream’s of ESA’s newest…

There have been indications for decades that there is a link between increased iron levels in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease. Leiden physicists find this connection as well, thereby now making a distinction between different forms of iron. They identify specific iron forms that increase in Alzheimer’s…

Leiden University will be opening a new Student Centre in The Hague, in the Orion Building at Turfmarkt. The Centre will have room for social and cultural activities, study workplaces and a fitness room for the growing number of students and staff at the Hague Campus.

If the recent bushfire crisis and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic have taught us anything, it’s that Australia has an opportunity to evaluate its coordination on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR).

The first Dutch National Post-Doc Prize was awarded to Dr. Hayley Mickleburgh, postdoctoral researcher in the field of funerary archaeology with ERC-Synergy NEXUS1492 at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University.

This year, the Chair of Brazilian studies celebrates its 20 year anniversary. The chair invites professors from Brazilian universities to come to Leiden, where they share their knowledge of Brazil with students. For its anniversary, Leiden welcomed five (former) holders of the chair. “People from all…

The Heritage Quest project begins on Monday 6 April. Heritage Quest is the first large-scale citizen science archaeology project in the Netherlands: anyone can help find archaeological remains at Utrechtse Heuvelrug, a heavily forested region in the Netherlands. Citizens can thus get involved in scientific…

When we hear the word ‘bird house’, do we process it as a whole or does our brain see it as ‘bird’ and ‘house’? PhD student Jiaqi Wang explored this for speakers of Mandarin Chinese.

The academic year of Leiden University's Honours Academy opened on 9 October. The opening ceremony was held in the Hooglandse church in Leiden.

The Netherlands aims to have open and responsive government. As part of the ‘Actieplan Open Overheid’, Ymre Schuurmans, Annemarie Drahmann and Louis Honée from the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law are researching how citizens' information position in administrative law proceedings…

The ‘Amorphophallus titanum’ at the Hortus botanicus Leiden is blooming. This Titan Arum, also known as the ‘giant penis plant’, last flowered in 2009.

The E2CB programme has been launched to bring CO2 emissions to zero by 2050. The goal: to produce all raw materials for the chemical industry from sustainable sources. Professor of Electrochemistry Marc Koper is involved in the project.

Two Humanities research masters and one master’s programme score well above average in the Keuzegids Masters: the research master History, the master and research master Classics and Ancient Civilizations.

A team of students from Leiden won the iGEM international biology contest in 2020 with their Rapidemic mobile testing kit. The kit makes it easy to detect viruses. The team has now been nominated for the Most Innovative Student in the Netherlands prize. Cast your vote and help them develop their inv…

Ilya Kokorin, Meijers PhD candidate at the Department of Financial Law, has been awarded the Gold Medal in the prestigious competition of the International Insolvency Institute (III), the 2020 Prize in International Insolvency Studies.

Dutch Parliament members are reluctant to discuss their urgent need for more support staff. They are afraid to be labelled as “greedy” or profiteers if they were to put in a request for more assistance. But times seem to be changing.

During a well-attended Studium Generale lecture at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Professor Ellen de Bruijn demonstrated how hormonal fluctuations influence the female brain. 'We urgently need more attention for the mental health of girls and women during transitional periods.'

Prof. David Fontijn’s Economies of Destruction team was invited by Museum Midtjylland to participate in this year’s excavation in Boest, Jutland (Denmark). The exceptional site of Boest includes burial mounds, an alignment and depositions, consisting of axes, spearheads and rings, dating to the Bronze…

Salvador Santino Regilme has been selected for a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Amsterdam. From September 2022, he will spend 5 months at NIAS working on his research project titled 'The Normative Order of the Global War on Drugs'.

The Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art have a long tradition of stimulating research in the arts. ACPA is currently developing with both institutions a new platform for research in and with the arts, with an emphasis on collaboration.

Rebekka Grossmann awarded Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship for research on the effects of migration on visual codes of global solidarity

What are the scenarios now the draft Brexit Agreement is on the table? And if the United Kingdom actually proceeds to leave the European Union, what is the time frame? Associate Professor of European Law Armin Cuyvers sheds light on the current state of affairs.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) announced on 25 April that it has appointed 18 new members. These include Leiden professors Andrew Webb and Jos Raaijmakers.

PhD candidate Demy Jongkind and Associate Professor Annemarie Drahmann – both part of the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law – have been interviewed by the Kenniscentrum Europa Decentraal (KED) on the Dutch Services Act (DW) and cannabis tolerance policy.

A group of Chinese law students currently study this semester at the Leiden Law Faculty with a special focus on public international law. These top talents have been selected by the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs to be China’s future diplomats, if they successfully finish their semester in Leiden…

The TRI Leiden Second Chance Project aims to promote recovery and re-integration of entrepreneurs who have recently undergone bankruptcy. The Project Team, Jan Adriaanse, Mark Dechesne and Jennifer van Kesteren, have been accepted to speak at the Personal Insolvency Conference themed ‘A Fresh Look at…

The book ‘Forty years of Leiden Environmental Science’ is available in digital format (PDF). It relates to the history of the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML).

A new analysis of the king cobra genome by Michael Richardson, Christian Henkel (IBL) and collaborators at the IBL and Naturalis, Helsinki and Singapore has been published in

With cancer, the immune system is a double-edged sword: it can attack tumour cells, but can also help them grow and spread. It is a question of harnessing it. This is what Professor Karin de Visser argued in her inaugural lecture on 15 November 2019.

Libraries in the Netherlands are removing books that contain references to Black Pete. According to the director of the Public Library Association, a logical and fitting response in the spirit of the times.

The recent ruling by the Amsterdam Court that Schiphol must reduce the number of flights from 500,000 to 460,000 is now ‘up in the air’ following the collapse of the Dutch government. How and when the reduction in flights is likely to take effect is now totally unclear.

The Institute for Philosophy is pleased to host the OZSW Graduate Conference in Theoretical Philosophy on 9 and 10 January 2019

An article by Georgina Kuipers has been published this month in Dutch journal Overheid & Aansprakelijkheid (Government and Accountability). It deals with policy introduced in response to damage caused by the construction of the Amsterdam North/South metro line and its aim to rebuild trust. The title…

Team Jumbo-Visma is going for gold at the World Championships this weekend in Salt Lake City. For this, they have worked on a new special training method. The Data Mining and Sports group of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) was involved in the development of this method.

igraph, an important open source network analysis library, will receive two grants of $400,000 (approximately €340,000) over the course of the next two years.

Leiden University political scientist Daniela Stockmann has been awarded the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize for best academic book in the field of media, politics, and public policy. Stockmann's 'Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China' (Cambridge University Press, 2013) was acknowledged…

Met een openingswoord, een paneldiscussie op de Spaanse Trappen in Wijnhaven en een druk op de rode knop voor het gebouw zelf, is POPcorner The Hague donderdagmiddag officieel geopend door rector magnificus Hester Bijl.

Leiden University has appointed John van Noort as Professor in Biophysics. He studies the way in which our DNA is folded and read out.

On 3 May, World Press Freedom Day was held and the Dutch 2022 'Persvrijheidsmonitor' was presented. The safety of journalists in 2022 was the most important theme in the area of press freedom in the Netherlands. Tarlach McGonagle, Professor of Medial Law & Information Society in Leiden, and Otto Volgenant,…

Marja Verstelle has received the SURF Education Award 2020. This prize is awarded each year, to five education professionals who have contributed to innovation in education, both within the Netherlands and beyond.