Extremist users of Telegram are moving en masse to other chat apps, such as the anonymous SimpleX. In this way, they hope to avoid detection, now that Telegram founder Pavel Durov is going to share personal data of criminal users with authorities.

RARE-NL, a new collaboration between university hospitals, hopes to find treatments for rare diseases. Professor Teun van Gelder is representing the LUMC in the initiative.

Four university medical centres, including the LUMC, are joining forces to increase pandemic preparedness in the Netherlands.

Explore how cultural heritage can proactively respond to global crises, from geopolitical conflicts to climate change, through innovative cross-cultural collaboration between Latin American stakeholders and Una Europa.

The new startup idea of Arko Ghosh and his colleagues at CODELAB concerns seamless brain assessments using day-to-day digital interactions. The study aims to make algorithms tuned to consumer-grade brain recordings and test the market readiness for this technology. In order to achieve this, the researchers…

Dutch scale-up In Ovo, a spin-off of Leiden University, has raised 34 million euros to accelerate its international growth and scale-up plans. The new funding is supported by Leiden University’s Libertatis Ergo Holding. The funding has also been provided by, among others, impact investors ECBF and ABN…

LUMC research has shown that women who previously had a miscarriage due to COVID-19 are not at increased risk of having another miscarriage or a stillbirth. Nor are preventive drugs needed during the pregnancy.

The Council of Ministers has appointed Jan Willem Erisman, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at Leiden University, as chair of the new Scientific Climate Council (WKR) from 1 March. This council will advise the government on climate policy.

The European Commission awarded the project proposal INSIGHT, a follow-up project on illegal firearms trafficking and gun violence from Professor Social Resilience and Security Marieke Liem and PhD-researcher Katharina Krüsselmann of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA).

This September, Adina Akbik received the Political Science Teaching Award at Leiden University. Created by student members of the Bachelor's and Master's Programme Committees (OLC), the award recognises remarkable teaching at the Institute. Akbik was chosen from five finalists after receiving several…

On 4 May, Leiden University remembered the victims of the Second World War from our university community. Alumni, students and present and former staff of the University came together for this Hour of Remembrance.

An international collaboration of astronomers is organising a special online lecture series for physicists and astronomers in Cuba. The reason for this is the tightening of measures against this country, as a result of which researchers can hardly get any information from outside the island. ‘Everyone…

In a topping out ceremony on Thursday 30 January, the new sports centre celebrated reaching its highest point and looked ahead to the future. The university will have a spacious and sustainable sports building by the start of 2026.

Organisation, Social

ICT, Security

The Leiden Archaeology social media team presents its first documentary on one of our faculty's research projects. A team led by Bleda Düring, Victor Klinkenberg, and Maria Hadjigavriel explores the Cypriot Chalcolithic period in Palloures, Cyprus.

Research

Lionel Laborie recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in Early Modern History (18th Century). He introduces himself.

What is ‘teaching excellence’ in Higher Education? Which different teaching excellence training, promotion and reward schemes exist across Europe? How can a common European teaching scheme look like? The e-NOTE project led by Leiden University with the participation of Charles University and other partners…

AI has applications in all kinds of fields. Would you like to organise an event on the possibilities of AI in your research field? The Leiden interdisciplinary research programme SAILS offers you experts on content, money and other support.

Eva Michaels talks about the current international security environment, including intelligence issues with Sir John Sawers in an interview in El País.

Leiden University’s Annual Report 2021 has been published. In this report, which consists of a general section and a financial section (the financial statements), the University provides a record of its research, teaching, knowledge transfer, operational management and policies in that year.

Through its Demonstrator Projects, the Dutch Oncode Accelerator consortium provides grants for preclinical cancer therapy development. The first call for these projects is open until September 2025.

How do classroom demonstration experiments help students learn chemical reasoning? Marie-Jetta den Otter, PhD student at ICLON, researched this. She defends her thesis on 6 December.

Leiden University has taken eighth place in this year’s SustainaBul, the sustainability ranking for universities and universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands. It was in 18th place last year.

Rahul Gandhi, former president of the Indian National Congress, was on the Hague Campus on 10 September.

What hidden nature is there in our cities and how can we use such organisms? This is what the HiddenBiodiversity project will be exploring over the next four years. The project’s kick-off meeting was held at the Hortus botanicus on Monday 26 September.

You can hardly avoid it if you want to quickly implement satellite internet. Elon Musk's company Starlink is "all-powerful in space" (Volkskrant). Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant wrote an extensive article on the situation and the possible dangers and alternatives. For this, they interviewed several experts,…

The Global Summit, which took place from 12-16 January 2021, is an initiative by Richard Albert, the William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, Director of Constitutional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Founder & Director of the International Forum on the Future…

What is life like as an academic? Twelve PhD candidates will report on their daily work in videos and blogs on the Faces of Science website (in Dutch). They include three researchers from Leiden who are researching topics such as North Korean support for African liberation movements, how differently…

Professor of cardiology Douwe Atsma (LUMC) looks beyond the traditional boundaries of hospitals and healthcare institutions for solutions to increasing pressure on the current healthcare system.

As a result of the current corona measures, attendance at the Opening of the Academic Year on 6 September will be restricted to a maximum of 75 persons. The ceremony can, however, be viewed online by taking part in a video wall.

Van Es is the successor to Professor Huijgen whose retirement is approaching after nearly 27 years’ professorship. This new appointment is from October 2022, but Van Es has been working at the faculty for some time.

We regret to share the news that our colleague, friend, and former professor of Assyriology at Leiden University, passed away on 15 May 2021.

LUMC and Leiden University will start the new two-year online master's program in Transfusion Medicine and Cellular and Tissue Therapies from October 2023.

The many thousands of small celestial bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit may have ended up there due to a star that passed close to the solar system billions of years ago. This is shown by Leiden simulation expert Simon Portegies Zwart, along with his German and Dutch colleagues. ‘We are answering several…

Organisation

Three of the four Heineken Young Scientists Awards for 2022 have gone to researchers from Leiden: chronobiologist Laura Kervezee, physicist Jordi Tura i Brugués and health psychologist Liesbeth van Vliet.

Cognitive psychologists Eliska Prochazkova and Mariska Kret from Leiden University have won an Ig Nobel Prize for their research into the romantic click between people. They discovered that attraction between people can be predicted by synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance.

Mirjam de Bruijn has received a funding from the Research Council of Norway for the research project called 'Decoding Digital Media in African Regions of Conflict (DDMAC)'. The project is a collaboration with colleagues from Oslomet and Simula, Norway, Utrecht University, University of Addis Abeba,…

As of 1 April 2025, Professor E.A.L.M.G (Elke) Moons has been appointed professor by special appointment of the chair ‘Crime Statistics’ at Leiden University’s Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden Law School.

In the new Annual Report 2022 we report on not only research and teaching at Leiden University but also ICT, real estate, personnel, finance, impact and knowledge transfer and more.

Education, Research

Research

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has granted four grants to Leiden humanities scholars. They get to spend this money on research on a topic of their choice, without thematic preconditions.

Research

Leiden University has taken 17th place in the UI Green Metric, a global sustainability ranking for universities. Over 1,400 universities from all around the world took part in the ranking.

The first global safety summit on Artificial Intelligence is a fact. Prime Minister Sunak organised the conference because he believes that the issues related to AI can only be dealt with by governments. But the real issue with AI remained undiscussed at the summit, Reijer Passchier claims in Dutch…

Last weekend, all university buildings were closed and the university systems were unavailable. The reason for this was the major maintenance of the university network. The network’s core needed to be shut down for this, including all supplies and services. A large group of staff from ISSC as well as…

From September 2024 onwards, Leiden University’s Europa Institute will teach a new LL.M. programme on the Governance of Migration and Diversity [GMD]. Programme Chair Moritz Jesse says, ‘We need lawyers who are well-informed about the historical, sociological and political background of migration.’