Dr Alex Geurds was elected as a Fellow for the Society of Antiquaries, a prestigious and old educational charity based in London. Established in 1707, the society aims at the encouragement and advancement of the study and knowledge of the antiquities.

An enormous number of monumental buildings, such as burial tombs, appeared in Mycenaean Greece after 1600 BC. Why did this urge to build come to an abrupt end 400 years later? Archaeologist Ann Brysbaert investigates the possible causes thanks to her ERC Consolidator Grant.

During the week of 27 June - 2 July, the Institute of History was host to the first SHAFR Graduate Summer Institute held outside of the United States. The theme of the Institute was Culture, Propaganda and Intelligence in Cold War History.

Neanderthals at Pech-de-l'Azé I in South Western France had a striking use for manganese dioxide 50,000 years ago.

Many people in the Netherlands have difficulty managing on their income. Professor by special appointment Wilco van Dijk, affiliated to Leiden University and Nibud, is researching what we can do to gain a healthier approach to managing our finances. His inaugural lecture is on 1 April.

In January 2015, during an excavation ahead of a road-building project in the west of the Netherlands, archaeologists from the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden, ARCHOL BV and ADC Archeoprojects recovered an extraordinary set of Bronze Age artefacts.

A diverse team of Leiden archaeologists applied for, and was awarded, the KNAW ‘Appreciated!’ grant, meant to further their science communication endeavours. We speak with Dr Maikel Kuijpers, who is the main contact person of the application.

Leiden University can build an alternative Humanities Campus on its own available land at the current location in the city. This is the conclusion of a feasibility study and is what the mayor and aldermen of Leiden write in a letter to the city council.

Inspectors at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can require people to provide more information relating to their tax returns. Esther Huiskers-Stoop from the Tax Law department investigated the rules in place to protect us when we are required to provide information to the tax authorities.

Do medicines arrive in the right amount at the right spot in our brain? By making a model that depicts our brain in small 'brain blocks', Esmée Vendel tries to find an answer to this question. Her new, mathematical model predicts the concentration of medicines in the brain over time and space. Vendel…

PhD students Alex Brandsen and Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart are both doing a project within the university’s Data Science research programme. The are introducing terms like ‘text mining’ and ‘advanced machine learning’ into archaeology. ‘These techniques will make archaeology more efficient and ch…

‘Timmermans says more Polish workers are staying in Poland, but there aren’t any figures to back this up,’ was the headline of NU.nl news website during the European elections in 2019. This was after Nieuwscheckers, the fact-checkers at Leiden University, had checked a statement by PvdA politician Frans…

The Future of Dying: End-of-Life Care in a Time of De-medicalized Death explores how patients, their relatives, and healthcare providers make decisions about end-of-life care when such treatments are readily available.

This book describes the different approaches for drug delivery to the brain with an emphasis on the physiology of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the governing principles and concepts for drug delivery across the BBB

Professor of Islam and the West Maurits Berger wants to use citizen science to answer this question. On the futureofislam.eu website, he is inviting European Muslims to complete an anonymous survey about how they see their future and the role of Islam in this. He will present the first findings at the…

Did you know that each year 18 billion animals die without making it to someone’s plate? Governance of Sustainability alumna Juliane Klaura has won the second prize for her thesis about the environmental impact of global food production. She won the prize at the university-wide master thesis award event,…

On May 15th, from 15.15 to 17.00 in the Vossiusroom, Leiden University Libraries will host a program on web-archiving and digital archives of Chinese communities in the Netherlands and Indonesia.

Jeroen Wolbers is Assistant Professor of Crisis Governance at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. In the coming 4 years, Jeroen will study command tactics during sudden-onset crisis operations with his Veni grant. He will investigate how crisis managers can deal with fr…

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have co-existed in France and Northern Spain for up to 2,900 years until the Neanderthals disappeared. This is what archaeologists from Leiden University and Cambridge University write in a new publication in Scientific Reports.

‘I was very happy and honoured that my thesis was recognised as a valuable contribution to the topic of landscape archaeology.’

Leiden's cultural anthropologist Anouk de Koning is receiving a Vici research grant for her project ‘Prototyping Welfare in Europe: Experiments in State and Society’ to study welfare experiments in four countries and to examine what they tell us about the futures of European welfare states.

Laura Heitman has been awarded a VIDI grant for her innovative drug research. Heitman strives to optimize a drug’s binding kinetics at its target in order to ultimately fight diseases effectively. She even pleads for a paradigm shift in drug discovery.

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…

Improvisers in experimental music do not record their music in a conventional score, but in ever-changing 'tactile pathways'. This is the proposition put forward by researcher Christopher Williams. PhD defence 13 December.

A Leiden-Delft-Erasmus research team has been awarded a LDE Global Support Grant to develop reusable algorithms in the remote detection of non-orthogonal architectural features, taking place in the archaeological context of the northern extremities of the Andean, part of the Istmo-Colombian Area.

In April 2025, Ms. Esther Rachow from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem presenting her ongoing doctoral research at an Austria Centre Leiden lunch-time talk. She answered a few questions about her visit below.

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…

Joanita Vroom and Mink van IJzendoorn have been awarded a grant of the Chastelain‐Nobach Fund, enabling them to continue their work at Gortyn, Crete. This project offers students opportunities to help uncover the archaeological mysteries of this important Roman and Byzantine city.

A large research group involving Leiden University as corresponding Host Institution has been awarded a major European grant, the ERC Synergy Grant. This for research on how Europe developed after the fall of the Roman Empire with special attention to the yet underexplored but undoubtedly important…

The province of South Holland is to collaborate with industry, the three LDE universities Leiden Delft and Erasmus, and the University of Wageningen in a knowledge and innovation programme to speed up the transition to a circular economy. The programme, ACCEZ, is expected to generate new knowledge.

Put two single people in one place and what do you get? Science! Psychologists at Leiden University will be conducting research on human attraction at the Lowlands festival on the 19th of August.

Alumna Simay Çetin received the award for her Master thesis: ‘Interpreting Culture through Embodied Practice: An anthropological study of sexuality among Dutch Women with Turkish Migrant backgrounds.’ Nova, Marta, Iris and Emma were awarded for their Fieldwork NL report.

Leiden University’s Living Lab is moving to the middle of the Leiden Bio Science Park. In the lab’s new home between the University of Applied Sciences, Mentor and Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the first ditches have now been dug. This new location is more accessible to both researchers and the public.…

Leiden researchers have developed a new method of determining the geographic origin of humans. Archaeologist Jason Laffoon and his team used the technique to discover where precolonial pioneers in the Caribbean region came from.

On Thursday the 29th of October, Kennis Maken Den Haag organises the third edition of Den Haag Draait Door. In this online talk show, experts and policymakers will discuss problems that exist in the city of The Hague. During this edition, as usual, students, researchers and residents from the region…

Political scientist Femke Bakker (Leiden University) has won the 2019 Jean Blondel PhD Prize. According to the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), her ‘Hawks and Doves: Democratic Peace Theory Revisited’ is best thesis in politics of the past year.

In Bronze Age Europe many bronze objects such as axes, swords and jewels were deliberately left at specific spots in the landscape. PhD research by Leiden archaeologist Marieke Visser shows that these practices were expressions of people’s relationship with the world around them. ‘It was a completely…

Every year a photographer portrays Leiden as Stadsfotograaf (City Photographer) of the Leidsch Dagblad. This year it is the honor to Leonie van der Helm, an alumna of cultural anthropology. Over the next 52 weeks, Van der Helm will visualize the meaning of 'home'.

As of 1 March 2018, Elizabeth (Liesbeth) de Lange has been appointed as Professor of Predictive pharmacology at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). She is head of the research group Predictive Pharmacology and mainly aims at developing mathematical models that can predict the effect…

During the Late Pleistocene, Europe was a cold and unforgiving place to live. Even so, groups of early modern humans roamed around, just like their Neanderthal counterparts. It is unclear what kind of dwellings these people inhabited to shelter them against the elements, especially in regions without…

Studying Sumerian grammar in your free time: Bram Jagersma did it. He described centuries-old Sumerian using a modern method he devised himself. For this PhD research he was awarded the De La Court Award for Independent Research by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science (KNAW).

The way DNA folds, largely determines which genes are read out. John van Noort and his group have quantified how easily rolled-up DNA parts stack. This costs less energy than previously assumed. Publication in Biophysical Journal.

As part of her Anthropology studies, Leiden student Marleen Kop has made a short documentary about the importance of Leiden-Noord’s ‘soup time’. Her chosen method was participative observation – she spent months helping residents prepare the soup – and the film can now be viewed online.

Thirteen Leiden University exchange projects have been awarded an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility grant. The total award of around 450,000 euros will enable 103 students and staff to go on an exchange.

Neanderthals in cold regions probably ate a lot more vegetable food than was previously thought. This is what archaeologist Robert Power has discovered based on new research on ancient Neanderthal dental plaque. PhD defence 1 November.

Archaeologists from Leiden University and the municipality of Apeldoorn have excavated two prehistoric ancestral mounds dating from 300 years BC at the 'Echoput' royal estate. The findings were presented to Her Majesty Queen Beatrix on Friday 2 November.

Ewa Snaar-Jagalska, Shuning He and colleagues from IBL, LION and LACDR reported on a new zebrafish study to understand micrometastasis of human cancer cells. They discovered a novel role for neutrophils in assisting metastasis formation, which provides critical insights for anti-cancer therapies.

On an excavation site in Oegstgeest Leiden University archaeologists discovered a very rare silver bowl from the first half of the seventh century. The bowl is decorated with gold-plated representations of animals and plants and inlaid with semi-precious stones. The discovery suggests the existence…

Leiden is proud to announce that the city has been selected to host the 33rd Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), scheduled for 25-28 August 2027.

The use of fire can tell us a lot about human evolution. Archaeologist Femke Reidsma has developed a more accurate technique to identify how our ancestors used fire. Existing archaeological studies will need to be revised. Reidsma’s study was published in Nature Scientific Reports on 2 November.