The study association of honours education SLHC established an international commission concerned with the closer involvement of international students in the Honours Community. The language of communication will become English where possible, and more upcoming activities will be organised in The Hague…

What is it like to work in the consulting industry? Twenty-five students from the bachelor programme Informatics & Economics visited the consulting firm BearingPoint, where they innovated the business model of a telecom company.

The immune system plays a paradoxical role in the spread of breast cancer. Some immune cells contribute to metastasis, while other cells can be activated to strengthen the effect of chemotherapy. Kelly Kersten made this discovery in her PhD research. PhD defence 7 February.

Maritime archaeologist Martijn Manders has been appointed professor of Underwater Archaeology and Maritime Cultural Heritage Management at Leiden University. He will combine his new appointment at the Faculty of Archaeology, which began on 15 July 2022, with his current position at the Cultural Heritage…

'Today is the start of EL CID, the first of three introduction weeks at Leiden University. A new influx of students is ready and waiting, eager to get started. Vice-Rector Hester Bijl warmly welcomes all new first-years. ‘Go for it and grab your chances!’

The city of Leiden has a unique combination of knowledge institutions. To ensure this knowledge flourishes and the city gains the maximum benefit from it, the Leiden City of Knowledge partnership was launched five years ago. A new partnership agreement will be signed on 11 November.

The programme for the Leiden Asia Year in 2017 is now available. Rector Carel Stolker launched the new website www.leidenasiayear.nl at the opening of the Academic Year of Leiden University on 5 September.

There are not many classes in which students can talk about their fears, self-critique, or their own happiness. In the Bachelor Honours Class ‘Personal Flourishing and Happiness’, this is exactly the plan.

Paul Hudson, a professor at Leiden University College, is organising a symposium on water management in the Netherlands and abroad that will take place on 22 March. We asked him what makes water management so important.

Clear information about support services, a well-being self-test and advice on finding a room. YounginLeiden.nl helps students and other young people get started, literally and figuratively. Why is this site so desperately needed?

Nu de NAVO inzet op 5% defensiebudget, zoekt Nederland naar financiering. Politicoloog Van der Zwan ziet kansen bij pensioenfondsen—mits defensie duurzaam heet.

History can be found in utensils and in interviews with ordinary citizens. ‘With the reconstruction of everyday life, an anthropological approach works better,’ thinks historian Jan-Bart Gewald. Inaugural lecture on 6 June.

Is polder rice a feasible circular alternative for cows on peatland? A pilot experiment started this week. On May 22nd, researchers from Leiden University and Wageningen University & Research (WUR) planted roughly 3,000 rice plants on the Polderlab near Leiden. The researchers want to test rice as a…

Three young researchers from Leiden have received an Early Career Award from KNAW for their innovative research. The award consists of the sum of 15,000 euros and an artwork.

Dutch politics is becoming increasingly polarised, and forming stable governments seems more difficult than ever. In the heat of the election race, a psychologist and a historian offer cool-headed advice.

War and terrorism overshadow interest in the pre-Islamic heritage of the Arabic peninsula. The new Leiden Centre for the Study of Ancient Arabia aims to make the general public more aware of the ancient history of this region.

Leiden University has received Wisselstroom funding for three projects to improve the information provision for prospective students and help them choose and transfer between study programmes.

Starting 1 January 2023, Matthias Haentjens has been appointed as Professor of Civil Law at Leiden University. His expertise lies in the field of property law, insolvency law, and private international law.

Marco Romagna is a PhD candidate who is currently researching hacktivism and hacktivists, online activists with hacking skills, a relatively new field of study. Romagna teaches at The Hague University of Applied Sciences working within the Centre of Expertise Cyber Security and is also connected to…

International Women's Day (8 March) saw the announcement of the first Leiden Top 50: fifty Leiden women who have made a difference over the past year through their activities. Many of the women in the list are affiliated with our University.

What is the name of the medieval Persian poet Nezami (✞ ca. 1209) doing on the cover of an Eric Clapton rock album? Asghar Seyed Gohrab, associate professor at the Institute for Area Studies, talks about it in a new blog for the Leiden Medievalists Blog.

LACDR, the Leiden Institute for Drug Research, developed better tolerated excipients to prevent adverse effects related to the surface of nanosized drugs such as vaccines. LADCR professor of Biopharmacy Matthias Barz and Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions (PTS) are collaborating to develop processes…

Welcome to Leiden and The Hague! So there you are, an international BA or MA student, in a city where you don’t know the way and don’t speak the language. What now? Don’t panic: with our international introduction programmes, you’ll soon have learnt all the ins and outs. And another important thing:…

Two Leiden legal scholars have been awarded funding from the KNAW pilot fund 'Science communication by scientists: Appreciated!'. The fund supports scientists who have demonstrated a continued commitment to science communication.

With the rise of AI, interest in computational linguistics and language models has taken flight. But machines are far from being able to go it alone. In her inaugural lecture, Professor Carole Tiberius will stress the importance of research on word combinations. ‘We know a great deal but there is a…

Protostars, data science, and the James Webb Space Telescope—Adriaan Janssen’s curiosity knows no bounds. As a double bachelor’s student in Physics and Astronomy, he has truly found his calling, underscored by his nomination for the title of Leiden Science Young Talent 2024.

In July, 2018, the Institute of Biology Leiden hosted the 11th conference of the Zebrafish Disease Models Society (ZDMS), an international association dedicated to the advancement of basic and clinical research using zebrafish disease models. More than 350 researchers from all over the world gathered…

Nadine Raaphorst, university lecturer at the Institute of Public Administration, has been awarded a Veni-subisidy from science financier NWO. This grant of up to 250,000 euros will enable her to set up her own research in the coming years. Raaphorst's research is about consistent decision-making by…

Songbirds apparently use mnemonics rather than more complex grammatical rules to recognise structures in which they have been trained. Leiden behavioural biologist Caroline van Heijningen published an article on this subject on Tuesday 17 November in PNAS.

For the first time in over half a century, one of oldest telescopes at the Leiden Observatory is getting a major improvement.

Archaeologist Natasja Sojc wants to study the archaeological finds from the Battle of Marathon as a source in themselves and thus without the need to view the mythical victory as a typical case of cultural superiority. She held her inaugural lecture about the ‘Marathon memorials’ on 4 February 2011.

Leiden University, together with Utrecht University, the LUMC and 10 other Dutch universities and institutes, has been awarded a grant of more than €30 million in the NWO call Roadmap Large-scale Scientific Infrastructure (GWI).

Daniela Kraft and her research are a familiar fixture at the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION). Both have been awarded fellowships, grants and frequent media coverage. Effective July 1, Kraft has been appointed professor of Experimental physics, particularly in soft and biological matter.

The Minister of Education, Culture and Science has approved the application for the master’s programme in Pharmacy in Leiden. This is an important step on the road to a new master’s programme.

Together with a large international team of scientists, researchers Peter van Bodegom and Nadia Soudzilovskaia of the Leiden Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) have created maps of variability in plant trait distribution across the globe. The new maps have been published in Proceedings of the…

Annemarie Samuels and Andrew Littlejohn, Assistant Professors at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, have both been awarded a Leiden University Fund research grant. Samuels will use the grant to kickstart a multi-sited ethnographic study of care at the end of life.…

This week Dr. Lara Weiss (of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden), who together with Dr Christian Greco (of the Museo Egizio in Turin) heads the project "The Walking Dead: The Making of a Cultural Geography in Saqqara", was visited by the NVIC team. During the visit she introduced them to the…

The METIS instrument that’s being built for ESO's future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Northern Chile under the leadership of the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has reached an important milestone: the preliminary design has been approved.

Terracotta pottery, precious ikat fabrics and the bazaars where these goods are sold: all these can be seen in a new Louvre film premiering on Friday 9 December. University lecturer Elena Paskaleva collaborated on the film Uzbekistan a timeless journey in Central Asia about Uzbek artefacts.

Three young lecturers are to receive a Comenius Teaching Fellow grant of 50,000 euros. The grant will allow each of them to implement an innovation project in their teaching.

The price of products and services plays an enormous role in society, and therefore also in the legal domain, according to Professor of Business Studies. Inaugural lecture 2 June.

More than twenty students were awarded an ALGANT diploma, the prestigious two-year master's in Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory from the Mathematical Institute of eight collaborative Universities on July 18th. At the graduation ceremony in Padua, Italy, five students who had spent their second year…

Nietzsche may well have criticised Spinoza, but even so, the two philosophers had more in common than we might think, according to young Romanian philosopher Razvan Ioan. PhD defence 1 November.

How can data science improve tax administration? Mark Pijnenburg, a senior data scientist at the Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration, decided to investigate this in a dissertation. He talks about his experiences: 'Sometimes a technique is scientifically interesting, but not applicable in real…

Bacteria and fungi on organic dairy farms are significantly different from those on conventional farms. That was discovered by postdoc researcher Sofia Gomes and her supervisors Nadia Soudzilovskaia and Peter van Bodegom in collaboration with the Louis Bolk Institute and Naturalis Biodiversity Centre.…

The world abounds with different footprints that calculate human impact on the environment. Environmental specialist Kai Fang is the first person to have developed a family of footprints that allow better measurement of environmental damage and the depletion of natural sources. PhD defence on 24 Nov…

The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, Antony Lowenstein, Verso Books, 2023

Mathematical biologists from Leiden have developed a model that helps to explain how the spine and vertebrae, among other things, form during embryonic development. The same process, the other way around, plays a key role in cancer metastasis. Publication in iScience.

Annelot did an internship with the crisis management team of ‘Rijkswaterstaat’. During her internship, she was involved in improving an app used for information management during crisis situations.

Seven prominent North Korean exiles will shed new light on the dictatorial state in a conference hosted by Leiden University on 17 and 18 September. All of the speakers once held high-ranking positions in the regime and now reveal its inner workings.