With 8.9 million euros from the Danish National Research Foundation, Aarhus University and Leiden Observatory will establish the Center for Interstellar Catalysis. The centre is led by Aarhus professor Liv Hornekær and aims to find out how and when the building blocks of life formed in the Universe.…

Do you want to be successful at stopping smoking? If so, the main thing is that you should see yourself as a non-smoker. Psychologist Eline Meijer has discovered that smokers who are unable to do this are more likely to resume smoking. This is more common among smokers from a lower socio-economic background.…

As a psychologist and pilot, Bert Busscher is interested in the phenomenon often termed as fear of flying. Busscher discovered that the heart rate of a person undergoing a therapeutic flight shows how much they still suffer from fear of flying. The post-flight heart rate can even predict whether the…

CML grants three Stans Awards each year, known as the best PhD paper, best student thesis and best outreach from the past year. The CML staff nominated students and colleagues and this year’s jury Helias Udo De Haes and Gjalt Huppes made the final decision.

Getting motivation, courage and tools to find a job that will help you tackle the climate crisis: it is at the heart of the course ‘Designing Your Career as a Climate Changemaker’. With their final presentations, the students conclude this climate-specific skills module within the Designing Your Life…

Due to the increasing resistance to certain antibiotics, the life-threatening condition sepsis is becoming harder to treat. For her PhD project, Leiden pharmacologist Feiyan Liu used mathematical modeling to find out how antibiotics can be used more effectively to cure sepsis.

During their second year, the students of the bachelor Security Studies get a feeling of what their professional career might look like.

Observations made with the ALMA telescope in Chile and ESA’s Rosetta mission, have detected the faint molecular fingerprint of methyl chloride in gas, a chemical commonly produced by industrial biological processes on Earth, around both an infant star and a comet. Methyl chloride, also known as Freon-40,…

With its FestivOWL theme, Orientation Week Leiden (OWL) promises to be one big festival for new international students in Leiden.

The goal of hit discovery is to identify suitable chemical starting points to modulate a drug target. A hit can be, a.o., a small molecule, a protein or mRNA. Hit identification is performed via rational design, genome mining, (targeted) library screening, or in silico approaches.

Looking for ways to travel more sustainably once you've reached your destination? Here, we offer some ideas and helpful links to guide you in becoming a more responsible tourist. Ecotourism, defined as "responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment, sustains the well-being of…

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,…

On 11 and 12 September 2025, a conference will take place at the KU Leuven, titled: "Canonical Life in Western Europe in the Long Tenth Century: Reforms, Identities and Intellectual Networks (Late Ninth Century - c. 1050)." The organisers invite paper proposals of max. 400 words in English or French,…

Twenty years from now, the world population is estimated to be around 9 billion people (now 8 billion). In combination with the improvements in living standards and the corresponding growth in consumption, this population will result in an enormous increase in the demand for food, consumables, water…

We aim to provide new insights relating to the spectacular multi-cellular life cycle of streptomycetes and other actinobacteria.

Shortly before Remembrance Day, a new film was launched about the life and legacy of Ben Telders. Telders was professor of Dutch Law at Leiden University at the start of the Second World War; he was imprisoned in a concentration camp on account of of his protest against the Nazis.

Young people spend a lot of their time online. Even so, we still know very little about how this intensive use of social media influences their development. Brain researcher and Spinoza Prize winner Eveline Crone from Leiden University and media psychologist Elly Konijn (VU) describes what the research…

Professor Kees Waaldijk presented the report on the LawsAndFamilies Database to Pearl Dykstra, member of the High Level Group of Scientific Advisors of the European Commission on 25 April. This comparative study shows that in European countries same-sex partners are increasingly gaining equal rights.…

The Just Peace Festival's first edition is live! The Opening Event marked the beginning of two weeks filled with activities to reflect on what peace and justice mean in today's world.

Most students do not have to deal with death on a daily basis. A Bachelor Honours Class about this specific topic seems to be a special experience: the discussions about end-of-life care are tough, and students are broken out of their comfort zone. They nevertheless agree upon one thing: these are all…

‘A challenging rollercoaster, but also a very bonding and insightful experience,’ that’s how the team of iGEM Leiden 2022 wraps up their participation in the iGEM contest. The contest for synthetic biology climaxed during the Grand Jamboree in Paris. The team ended up in the top 10 of over 360 teams…

How adolescents perceive parenting is related to their mood. Differences between the perspectives of parents and adolescents are also of importance for adolescents’ mood. That is what research by Loes Janssen and her Leiden University colleagues in Clinical Psychology shows. Open Access publication…

Giliam de Valk, assistant professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, was one of the speakers at the third congress of the National Thinking Tank Integral Security on 6 February.

Promotor: W.T. de Groot

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson

How did Anglo-Saxons reflect on the experience of growing old? Was it really a golden age for the elderly, as has been suggested?

For thousands of years, societies have fallen under the reign of a single leader, ruling as chief, king, or emperor. In this fascinating global history of medieval and early modern dynastic power, Jeroen Duindam charts the rise and fall of dynasties, the rituals of rulership, and the contested presence…

Migration imposes special pressures on the meaning, experience and organization of lifecycle rituals. These pressures are felt most strongly by Muslim migrants to Western Europe. In this innovative study, Nathal M. Dessing examines the effects of migration on the life cycle rituals of Moroccan, Turkish…

Promotor: E.F. Smets Co-promotor: J. Geml

My artistic practice deals with documents and, more specifically, with the use and the exploration of their narrative potential.

This dissertation focused on computational methods based on first principles calculations using the Density Functional Theory (DFT) framework. Emphasis was laid on affordable methods that can provide a tradeoff between computational expense and accuracy.

Hydrogen fuel cells are expected to be pivotal in the energetic transition towards renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. However, their industrial scalability is severely hindered by the high cost and degradation rate of platinum catalysts, one of their key components. Addressing this…

How do mycobacteria subvert the defenses of host immune cells?

Kuba funerary art from the Congo River Basin

Leiden University is established in two cities: Leiden and The Hague.

Bacteria are highly complex and diverse organisms that have adapted to survive in ecological niches ranging from the most extreme to the most heterogeneous environments.

Leiden Law School has a methods portal that offers an overview of the various phases of empirical legal research.

This work is dedicated to interpreting in cohomological terms the special values of zeta functions of arithmetic schemes.

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.P. van Wezel

Human civilization consumes a huge amount of fossil fuels, which has resulted in an atmospheric CO2 level which has not been higher in over 800 millennia.

Lecture

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is widely used to automatically build a suitable practical Machine Learning (ML) model for an arbitrary real-world problem, reducing the effort of practitioners in the ML development cycle for real-world applications. Optimization is a key part of a typical AutoML…

Bacteriophages, or phages for short, are the most abundant biological entity in nature. They shape bacterial communities and are a major driving force in bacterial evolution.

Promotores: Prof.dr. G.W. Canters, Prof.dr. T.J. Aartsma

This research delves into a region of space known as the interstellar medium (ISM), which is essentially the area between the stars filled with gas and dust.

This book project explores the changing dynamics of marriage and family life in postwar Japan based on an examination of the life histories of single mothers.

Leiden Professor of Astronomy Mike Garrett is searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. In his Kaiser lecture on 23 April he will discuss how far science has progressed in this quest.

James Webb life’s building blocks

Together with physiotherapist and lifestyle therapist Jaap Wonders of SMC Rijnland, Helen Pluut conducted research during the first COVID-19 wave on the experiences of working people. The reason for the research was the compulsory situation of working from home many people found themselves in. One of…