On Monday 10 February 2020, guest lecturer Prof. Dr. Cedric Ryngaert (Utrecht University) will deliver a lecture on ‘Jurisdiction and the Territorialisation of the Extraterritorial’. This event is hosted by the ‘Interaction between Legal Systems 2.0’ (ILS) projects ‘Policing the high seas’ and SOLID…

The youngest institute of the Faculty of Science has had a real growth spurt in recent years. It is up to Martina Vijver as the brand-new scientific director to secure that growth and further develop CML. 'This is a challenge that I am really looking forward too,' says Vijver. 'Together with my colleagues…

Young Academy Leiden (YAL) will change its board this month and welcome seven brand-new members.

Quentin Bourgeois, Associate Professor of European Prehistory, will assume the position of Vice-Dean for Education at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University as of 1 February 2026, for a term of four years. Quentin Bourgeois succeeds Alex Geurds, who became Dean of the Faculty on 1 January 2…

Political philosopher Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) has been awarded a EURIAS Fellowship at Aarhus University’s Institute for Advanced Study (AIAS). From from 1 October 2018 to 31 July 2019 Vrousalis will work at the Danish research institute on his project ‘Inequality against Freedom: Economic…

Met de val van Balkenende IV laait de discussie over het functioneren van politieke partijen binnen ons democratisch bestel weer op. Opgeblazen ego’s, overambitieuze politici en partijpolitieke machtspelletjes zouden echte democratie in de weg staan. Maar die discussie is niet nieuw.

In collaboration with: Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, the Netherlands & Mar Chrysostom Chair, Mahatma Gandhi University, India

Leiden evolutionary biologist Maurijn van der Zee has co-operated on an enormous international project to describe the genetic material of the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum. The more than 100 authors involved in the project have published their findings in the online magazine PLoS Biology.

Human trafficking is much more than kidnapping and selling people. Those who commit labour exploitation can, for example, also be sentenced for human trafficking. Criminologist Masja van Meeteren hopes to simplify the complexity of the phenomenon by charting the different forms of labour exploitati…

Jean-Eric Paquet, a Director-General at the European Commission, visited Leiden University on 20 February. He was impressed by the researchers’ drive, the wide range of topics that they research and the strong collaboration with Leiden Bio Science Park.

Social, Economic and Organisational Psychology focuses on the application of scientific psychological knowledge of social processes within and between groups of people and individuals, in organisations, but also during economic and consumer decisions.

Three quantum-safe cryptography methods have been standardised for worldwide use since this week. Léo Ducas co-designed the two primary PQC methods selected for this standardisation. Ducas is part of the Cryptology group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and is also professor of Mathematical cryptology…

As of 1 November, Laura Heitman has been appointed full Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). Heitman has been working on the understanding and improvement of drug-receptor interactions in early drug discovery. ‘My ultimate aim is to make medicines…

Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden Professor of Modern Japan Studies, was already the recipient of a VENI and a VIDI grant. Now she has also been granted a VICI, worth 1.5 million euro, for her research project Garbage Matters: A Comparative History of Waste in East Asia. ‘I want to do something that hasn’t…

One Lecture about Immigrant Integration in the EU and its Member State at the Institute of European Studies at George Washington University, one class in a course on Immigration and Integration at Georgetown University, and a lot of judging in the international rounds of the Phillip C. Jessup International…

When discussing enslavement, attention often focuses on Africans forcibly shipped to South America. Researcher Timo McGregor's new Veni research sheds light on a lesser-known method, whereby indigenous populations were enslaved through the households of colonisers.

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?

Many members of Chicago's P'urhepecha community did not even know they lived a stone’s throw from some of their own historical heritage. Researcher Kate Bellamy organised a meeting to introduce them to books hundreds of years old.

If you follow the western media, you are likely to think of ‘Africa’ as the continent of origin of desperate migrants, a continent of hunger and disease and a breeding ground for international terrorism. But if you want to see the bigger picture, you should look no further than the African Studies scholars…

In 2022, many of our staff and students won fantastic prizes and were awarded important research grants.

In 2021 many of our students and staff won fantastic prizes and were awarded important research grants. This is our traditional review of these successes as the end of one year marks the beginning of another.

Lecture, Tuesday Talk

This project investigates the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies and discourses.

A friendly chat is more complicated than you might think. As soon as the other person finishes talking, you already have an answer ready. But how do we know when it's time to change turns? University lecturer Johanneke Caspers has been awarded an NWO Open Competition grant to investigate the role of…

University lecturer Dario Fazzi and postdoctoral researcher Gaetano Di Tommaso set up a virtual collaboration with the United States last year thanks to a VIS grant. And it was a such a success the project will be repeated next year. Fazzi is looking forward to once again offering his students a multicultural…

We are pleased to invite submissions for a conference exploring how heritage and memory practices, alongside the legacies of climate coloniality, shape contemporary understandings and mobilisations of reparations. This event will examine how historical and political dynamics influence reparative justice…

Pandemics, terrorist attacks, environmental disasters... These are real threats, which we cannot ignore. In fact: we need to prepare better for the large-scale crises of the future. Preferably in a way that suits our lifestyle and respects our social values. Over the next ten years, an interdisciplinary…

Histories Connected: Roundtable

Graphene and other layered materials combine into completely new substances. Leiden physicists establish the ground rules for designing such materials by measuring how the layers in the stack interact. Publication on November 29 in Nature Communications.

The new project INFLANET will train young scientists in Europe to become experts in inflammation research. Professor Annemarie Meijer from the Institute of Biology Leiden coordinates the training.

Some 5000 years ago the people of the corded ware culture exchanged ideas about death on a continental scale. There were strong gender differences in these ideas: men were buried in an international style, and women in a local style. This discovery was made by archaeologist Quentin Bourgeois.

The monthly ILS lunch seminars continue to bring together colleagues from across Leiden Law School. On December 14, we successfully concluded the calendar year with the presentations of Dr. Moritz Jesse and Helena Ursic.

Astronomers at ASTRON and Leiden University have used the LOFAR radio telescope to discover a 'brown dwarf' – a faint object more massive than Jupiter, but significantly less massive than the Sun. The discovery of the object dubbed Elegast, opens up a new path that uses radio telescopes to discover…

Clinical psychologist Bernet Elzinga has been appointed as Professor of a personal chair at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. This professorship will contribute both nationally and internationally to the broader promotion of Leiden University in the field of stress and psychopathology.

IBL-researchers revealed in a new study that insects are successful on land because their eggs became protected against desiccation. An extraembryonic membrane in the egg, the serosa, helped insects to make the transition from water to land.

Asexual procreation in female wasps leads to an accumulation of genetic mutations, and the shrivelling of their sex organ. Leiden biologist Ken Kraaijeveld published this discovery in Evolution. His research is one of the first experimental studies into the consequences of asexual procreation.

What do you do as a government if you are at a loss? You ask an expert for help. In the seventeenth-century Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, one expert after another popped up to advise one of the many regional authorities. In her Veni project, researcher Anna-Luna Post sets out to discover…

Bringing the theoretical world of mathematics and computer science to more applied research areas. That is what Daan Pelt, assistant professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) is trying to achieve with the methods he is developing as a solution to challenges in image proc…

With her Veni research, investigator Rosanne Baars from the Institute of History aims to demonstrate that women played a role in the eighteenth-century diplomatic circles of the Ottoman Empire. ‘We already know that one woman led the entire embassy.'

Political scientist Rebekah Tromble (Leiden University) has been appointed as an academic advisor to the Social Science One research commission. She will assist the commission in its new partnership with Facebook, which aims to facilitate in-depth studies of the role of social media in elections and…

Four researchers from Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science have been awarded a grant to jointly investigate attitudes towards Venezuelan immigrants among youths in Ecuador. Combining their expertise and collaborating with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, they will focus on school-going…

In the context of growing political polarisation, the spread of misinformation, and increases in incivility and intolerance, how can Twitter assess and improve the quality of its conversations? To address this question, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Leiden University, Syracuse University,…

Floreat et crescat. Flourish and grow. That was what was wished for the Mathematical Institute at its opening. Now, the institute proudly celebrates its 70th anniversary. Time to reflect on how it all began. And importantly, how is it doing now?

Orange the World 2025

Many of the challenges of our time are too complex to be resolved within the confines of a single discipline. Leiden University is a broad-based university where an incredible number of research fields converge. That makes us the ideal breeding ground for, and practitioners of, interdisciplinary research…

Two years after launching an ERC Starting Grant to investigate cultural stereotyping in European Union governance, Adina Akbik and Christina Toenshoff at Leiden University are now publishing their first major findings. Looking at public opinion across the EU, the researchers show that cultural stereotypes…

The norms, institutions and power relations that have defined the last decades of international political and economic relations in the European Union are undergoing major transformations. With the return of competition between great and ambitious powers, like the US, China, EU and Russia, the need…

What if a major world event alters the trajectory of your research project? Tsolin Nalbantian was studying citizenship along the Turkish-Syrian border when the Syrian Civil War erupted and led to a global refugee crisis. While her research participants were forced to flee the region, she was forced…