The 7th Pan-European Conference on the European Union hosted from 5 until 7 June 2014 by the Campus The Hague was a success.

The Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) alliance signed a collaboration agreement with the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology on 23 September.

Vincent Bakker, PhD Candidate at the Department of Economics, was awarded the Research Master’s Thesis Prize 2017 of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Science.

For many years, human rights have mostly been a theme where states constituted the most important actors. Influenced by globalisation and the worldwide integration of the economy, multinational corporations have grown to feel more responsible for compliance to human rights.

Dimiter Toshkov, Associate Professor, Brendan Carroll, Assistant Professor, and Kutsal Yesilkagit, Professor International Governance, of Leiden University, wrote an article for the Washington Post about the European governmenets that acted quickly in times of a pandemic. And these governments are…

A flood of news reports, push notifications and even extra news broadcasts: on Wednesday, the world was shocked by the storming of the Capitol in Washington. Americanist Sara Polak discusses the events.

A recent study shows that immigrants in the Netherlands earn 15 per cent less on average than their colleagues without a migrant background. Olaf van Vliet, Professor of Economics, comments on this pay gap in ‘de Volkskrant’ newspaper.

IBL-PhD-student Michelle Spierings delivered a great performance at the FameLab national final on the 21st of April. She is now also happy to be back behind her desk.

As of 1 June 2018 Olaf van Vliet has been appointed as Professor of Comparative Welfare State Analysis at Leiden University. The Endowed Chair in Comparative Welfare State Analysis is supported by Instituut Gak. This chair is embedded in both the Department of Economics (Leiden Law School) and the Institute…

Youth unemployment in the Netherlands has risen sharply in recent years, though many vacancies cannot be filled. Olaf van Vliet, Professor of Economics, spoke to NU.nl about the issue: ‘Youth unemployment has consistently been higher than the overall unemployment rate.’

Associate professor Salvador Santino Regilme spoke in various media outlets about the tensions between the United States and Venezuela.

PhD researcher David Font Vivanco, together with Ester van der Voet, Reinout Heijungs and Renée Kemp (Maastricht University) won the Graedel Prize 2014 for best paper published by a junior author in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The EU and Switzerland have negotiated a broad package of agreements that awaits formal signature by the parties.

Assistant Professor Christopher Green was interviewed on ABC Australia about the recent COVID-19 outbreak in North Korea. Green says that the statistics the isolated country has given are ‘essentially nonsense’.

Lieke Kools has won a Netspar PhD Thesis Award 2020 with her dissertation ‘Essays on wealth, health, and data collection’.

The importance of digitalization has become even more evident during the Corona crisis. Society and the Dutch economy are therefore rapidly digitizing. This calls for a good balance between seizing opportunities and reducing risks.

People in the Early Bonze Age used bronze artefacts as a means of payment. This is the conclusion reached by archaeologists Maikel Kuijpers and Catalin Popa in a PLOS ONE article published on 20 January. The discovery led to a surge of media reports.

Tolerance and democracy are not our European values

Nira Wickramasinghe, professor of modern South Asian studies at Leiden University, spoke to Al Jazeera about Sri Lanka's turbulent past:

Frank Takes, Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), analyses the flow of funds in our economy using big data. With Jort Kelder, he discussed the value and importance of these data on NPO Radio 1.

Great news: the MOOC

University lecturer Miko Flohr talks in a new BBC documentary about how people responded to the eruption of 79, and on whether or not they were excavating a fullonica.

To support interdisciplinary research on today's world-scale changes and governing challenges, the GTGC programme awards a number of seed grants to scholars at Leiden University collaborating across different faculties and institutes.

Talk That Science, a podcast with the aim of presenting science in a challenging, new and relevant way. They do this by combining music and science. Talk That Science was founded a few months ago and has grown into a medium where science, music, young adults and scientists come together.

Last week we organized an event together with the Green Office from the Bucerius Law School. We wondered: how realistic is UBI as an option to create a more sustainable society? More than 100 people signed-up to join us to find an answer to this question.

Ever wondered how big the food waste problem really is?

Rob van Wijk gave an interview on the role of zebrafish in drug discovery and development, published in FIGON’s journal Medicines as a preview of LACDR’s representation at the PhD competition during the Dutch Medicines Days (DMD). The entire interview can be read below.

Economies worldwide are increasingly interconnected; trade in raw materials and semi-finished products is increasing. Many products we use in the Netherlands originate abroad, and many products we make in the Netherlands are destined for other countries. Almost all countries around us participate in…

Roxanne Hoenstok, International Studies graduate and current International Relations student, has been nominated for the Grand Final of Rotterdam100. She stands to win a trip to Singapore and letters of recommendation from the mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, and former prime minister Jan-Peter…

Beatriz Pañeda Murcia, from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, will be present at our Faculty as a guest PhD researcher over the coming months.

Multidisciplinary research has established that VAT-results are in practice six times lower than what it should have been. The new estimates rely on machine learning techniques.

In the CSM-elective ‘Governance of Crime and Social Disorder,’ Dr. Elke Devroe challenges her students to engage in an interactive group role-play on various themes related to the governance of crime. During this exercise, each group of students brings to life a sensitive security topic – such as mass…

The Faculty Board awarded 16 starter grants to young assistant professors for their research proposals.

This year Dirk Visser will celebrate working at the faculty for 25 years. During this period he has progressed from being a student assistant to becoming an expert in information and copyright law in the Netherlands. This event will be marked with a symposium to be held on 2 September as part of the…

Athletes always strive for the top. How can data scientists assist them in improving their performance? During the seminar Data Science and Sports, the possibilities and challenges of collaboration between these two worlds were discussed.

What are the benefits for us of collaboration with Chinese partners? What sparks off Leiden researchers' interest in collaborating with colleagues in China? Leiden University shows in three short films what joint projects are like.

On 9 June 2023, the workshop on ‘Academic Freedom and its Philosophical Underpinnings in EU law’ took place at the Academy Building, Leiden. It was organized in the framework of the Vidi research project The EU fundamental right to ‘freedom of the art and sciences': exploring the limits on the commercialisation…

Using E. coli bacteria to convert a toxic compound in the soil on Mars into oxygen to make life on the planet possible. A team of thirteen Leiden students are taking part in the annual iGEM competition with an entry based on this idea. iGEM is an international competition for students where they use…

How can computers help design optimal buildings? PhD student Koen van der Blom makes algorithms that take into account all kinds of different architectural requirements, in order to reach the best compromise. And that is quite difficult: 'Algorithms do not automatically understand that a building that…

On an apparently normal cube a pattern of hollows and bulges appears when the cube is compressed. A method has been developed to design such three-dimensional structures and to construct these using simple building blocks. Publication in Nature.

No less than four Leiden research teams have been awarded a grant by NWO. On 27 July NWO honoured 21 applications in the Open Competition ENW-XL. NWO awards the grants to consortia in the exact and natural sciences who are doing unconnected fundamental research that is 'driven by curiosity'.

'The way we consume information has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years. You're no longer just a receiver; you participate, create, and spread information. So why not use that to improve society?'

With the end of the year coming to a close, it is time for a celebration. Twenty driven lecturers, among them 5 academic staff members of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs in The Hague, were awarded their Senior Teaching Qualification by Vice- Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl.

For the first time, physicists have visualized the ‘melting’ of electrons inside a special class of insulators. It allows electrons to move freely and turns the insulator into a metal and possibly later into a superconductor. Publication in Nature Physics.

Lecture, China Seminar

China makes no secret of its ambitions to become the world’s leading nation. What can we expect now that the EU and the rest of the world are in recession? And why did President Donald Trump suspend US funding to the World Health Organization? Rob de Wijk, Professor of International Relations and Security…