Turkish and Syrian students met Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl to discuss how the university can support students who have been affected by the earthquake.

We catched up with Annette Righolt, Honours College coordinator at FGGA, about a grant, a new course and the new year.

What to do when more than forty boxes, filled to the brink with archival materials from the study of religion ranging all the way from the 1960’s up until contemporary times, ‘surfaces’? This may not be a typical question that you ask yourself on an average weekday. However, it is a question that must…

The European Research Commission (ERC) has awarded Advanced Grants to two Leiden researchers. Joke Meijer will be researching the effect of the biological clock on our health and Carlo Beenakker will be looking for Majorana fermions in superconductors.

Which molecules go into forming planets? PhD candidate Christian Eistrup and his colleagues have created new models to research this question. Their findings could change our idea of which molecules were forming Jupiter or even Earth.

The recently promoted Hao Wang from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science teaches computer programmes how to solve real-world problems. His goal is to make the process of problem-solving more efficient. On 1 November, he obtained his doctorate with the predicate cum laude. ‘I hope to solve…

Graphene has held a great promise for applications since it was first isolated in 2004. But we still don’t use it in our large-scale technology, because we have no way of producing graphene on an industrial scale. Leiden physicists have now visualized for the first time how atoms behave in between graphene…

All supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies appear to have periods when they swallow matter from their close surroundings. But that is about as far as the similarities go. That's the conclusion reached by British and Dutch astronomers from their research with ultra-sensitive radio telescopes…

The ROBUST consortium, which is the initiative of the Innovation Center for Artificial intelligence (ICAI), has received 25 million euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to strengthen fundamental AI research. The Leiden interdisciplinary research programme SAILS is part of ROBUST.

Researchers at FOM-institute AMOLF and the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) have developed a rubber rod with strange bending behaviours. Beyond a certain point, it bends more under decreasing pressure. This behaviour doesn’t fit our expectations and does not conform to secular laws that predict the…

Leiden physicists have managed to detect a single molecule called dibenzoterrylene in a new crystal, and found that it is a candidate component for a quantum network. Future quantum computers will need such a network to work together while maintaining their advantages. Publication in ChemPhysChem jo…

Mass, time, space, and complexity — physicists in Leiden are launching eight new research projects tackling some of the most fundamental themes in quantum mechanics. Their goal: to push the limits of current quantum theories.

The ROBUST consortium, which is the initiative of the Innovation Center for Artificial intelligence (ICAI), has received 25 million euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to strengthen fundamental AI research.

Physicist Jelmer Renema will spend two years conducting research at Oxford University in Great Britain funded by a Rubicon grant from NWO.

A team of scientists, including Leiden Astronomer Alice Booth, has discovered silicon monosulfide molecules in the dust disk around a young star. Such molecules indicate planet formation. The team made the discovery using the ALMA telescopes. This method provides an alternative when direct observation…

It takes years to develop new medicines, from the test tube to trials in humans. During the process it often happens that a drug that seems promising in the initial stage has to be dropped in a later phase. This costs time and money. Leiden University and the LUMC are working closely together to make…

Leiden astronomer Anthony Brown had the honour to give the prestigious Spitzer Lectures at Princeton University. In five lectures spread over the beginning of May, he gave an insight into the Gaia Mission. ‘One of the intellectual highlights of the year.’

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Circinus galaxy is being fed with gas by two spiral arms. This is what PhD candidate Wout Goesaert discovered. But only a small percentage disappears into the black hole, the rest is ejected.

Leaf-eating caterpillars greatly enrich their intestinal flora by eating soil. Even effects of plants that previously grew in that soil can be found back in bacteria and fungi in caterpillars. Researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Leiden University write about this discovery…

To eat or get eaten. It describes the evolutionary race of snakes versus the mammals and birds that prey on these snakes. Muzaffar Ali Khan devoted his PhD to investigating the molecular mechanisms play of the evolutionary arms race, and has his promotion 16 February. What makes mammals and birds successful…

An international team of astronomers has witnessed a cosmic weather event that has never been seen before.

Smart drug carriers, uneven cosmic expansion, and solar energy storage in molecules. These are the topics of three newly awarded NWO-XS grants to researchers at the Faculty of Science.

It's pretty hard to spot a single 5 nanometer particle. Leiden physicists pulled it off by turning a 120 nm gold rod into a detector.

In November a new extracurricular programme will begin: the Impact Challenges. Students will work together in small groups to solve problems, put forward by partner organisations. In this way, they train their practical skills and make a contribution to society.

Paramagnetism. An obscure occult practice? No. It’s one of the newest scientific methods for mapping the behaviour of proteins with great precision. Marcellus Ubbink has been awarded 3 million euro by NWO and Leiden University to purchase a very powerful instrument. The goal: to acquire greater insight…

The current COVID-19 vaccination campaign involves injecting the vaccine into muscle tissue, but injecting a smaller amount of vaccine in the skin might also provide good protection. The #wakeuptocorona crowdfunding campaign has enabled Anna Roukens (LUMC) to examine the safety and efficacy of vaccination…

Tic tac toe, but with quantum effects. That makes learning the principles of quantum technology a piece of cake. This is the aim of a new start-up founded by researcher Evert van Nieuwenburg: QuantumPlayed. ‘Quantum is all around us and everyone should be able to learn about it.’

The government wanted to show some muscle by making it compulsory to wear face masks in public indoor spaces as of 22.00 hours on 14 October. But it looks as though this will be 1 November after all. No need for that, tweeted Leiden professor of constitutional law Wim Voermans on 14 October, you can…

Minuscule elementary particles from space colliding with Earth can give us an insight into the distant objects they come from. But first, you need to know how to catch them. With a Vidi grant from NWO, researcher Sjoert van Velzen will 'hunt' for neutrinos coming from exploding black holes.

Putting our interns to work’ is the third-year slogan for the Master’s Programme in Medicine at Leiden University. After their regular residency periods, students are encouraged to find an internship in demanding sectors where they would like to work after completing their studies. In the MasterMindsChallenge,…

It must be there. We just cannot see it: mysterious dark matter and dark energy in the universe. Henk Hoekstra is one of the many cosmologists who would love to know what exactly these substances consist of. He has received a European research grant of 1.3 euro million to find out.

PhD candidate Daniël Gomon has developed statistical methods that could significantly improve research in fields like medicine and demography. ‘Mathematicians don’t like unrealistic assumptions,’ he says. Gomon will defend his PhD thesis on 19 June.

After a promising start, also the second pilot of the digital Brightspace skills platform is a success. Third-year bachelor students had thirty new skill modules at their disposal to support them with their research assignment. Despite the additional challenges posed by COVID-19, students that used…

How can we best deal with the current problems caused by the human impact on the nitrogen cycle? How do we make the transition to a sustainable society? As of 1 September, nitrogen expert Jan Willem Erisman will be working on these questions at Leiden University: he will exchange the Louis Bolk Institute…

'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!’

There is an ongoing struggle between the Minister of Public Health, Hugo de Jonge, and the Dutch Municipal Health Services (GGDs). De Jonge wants the GGDs to speed up testing, conduct more tests, and allow priority testing but the GGDs are pulling on the brakes. The waiting lists for a corona test have…

For the first time, astronomers have observed in three dimensions that gas from spiral galaxies is blown upwards and downwards at high speed, far out of the galaxy. They thereby confirm the theory of galaxy evolution: that star-forming galaxies create intergalactic gas flows by discharging gas along…

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.…

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.

Microscopic swimmers such as bacteria do not always swim alone. There are advantages to exchanging information and cooperating. Stefania Ketzetzi and colleagues now show in Nature Communications that human-made microswimmers, too, can cooperate.

Alessandra Silvestri has been appointed professor in Theoretical Physics in the area of Cosmology. For her this promotion in Leiden is the icing on the cake. ‘But there are many more boxes I would like to tick.’

Astronomers led by Leiden astronomer Sebastiaan Haffert have directly imaged two planets that are gravitationally carving out a wide gap within a planet-forming disk surrounding a young star. While over a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged, this is only the second multi-planet system to be p…

Researchers from Leiden and Delft have found a way to look inside early-modern bookbindings. An x-ray technique has allowed them to search for remains of medieval manuscripts hidden inside the bindings. After the Middle Ages many manuscripts were recycled, their pages pasted inside bookbindings to provide…

Our solar system probably evolved in the same way as most of the other planetary systems around us. This has been shown by German-Austrian-Dutch research on more than 870 planet-forming disks in the Orion cloud A. The five researchers, including three from the Leiden Observatory, published their findings…

CERN has approved the construction and operation of SND@LHC, a neutrino detector at the Large Hadron Collider. It's a precursor for SHiP, a detector meant to detect dark matter. Leiden physicist Alexey Boyarsky is one of the initiators of both SHiP and SND@LHC.

The 18.8 million euro NWO Zwaartekracht grant for quantum software which Amsterdam, Delft and Leiden landed collectively, means for Leiden University among others the appointment of two new permanent scientific staff members, who will each form their own research group, divided among Computer Science,…

Early treatment benefits patients who have not fully developed rheumatoid arthritis but are in the preliminary stages of the disease. This is what researchers from the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) have reported in The Lancet. Patients in the pre-arthritis stage who were temporarily prescribed…

The quality of vaccines is still often tested by using laboratory animals. That has to change, according to researchers from Leiden University and the vaccinological institute Intravacc. Together they went searching for a test method that makes animal testing unnecessary. The first promising results…

A new government, conflicts around the world and obviously a lot of science: these are the five stories about Leiden University that you enjoyed reading in 2024.

A world-famous light experiment from 1801 has now been carried out with sound for the first time. Research by physicists in Leiden has produced new insights that could be applied in 5G devices and the emerging field of quantum acoustics.