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.

Around 15% of all Dutch people say they can't distinguish between left and right. People taking their driving test regularly take wrong turns and arguments flare up because that all-important turn is missed on the way to the camp site. Researchers in Leiden and Utrecht are trying to find out what's…

On Thursday May 11, medical anthropologists from Leiden University organized a festive opening of their new network, the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network (LUMAN). In August 2022, these Leiden-based scholars started gathering and organizing this new network with two main goals, namely to…

People who move most in the afternoon and evening are less insulin resistant than people who move mainly in the morning or spread throughout the day. This makes them at lower risk of type 2 diabetes. These are the results that researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have published…

Astronomers at Leiden University have discovered the first planets using a new instrument: the planet hunter MASCARA. This instrument, developed at Leiden Observatory, looks specifically for planet transitions around the brightest stars in the sky, which surprisingly enough have so far have hardly been…

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'.

For an assignment for the course Medical Anthropology, students were asked to choose a theme related to the Covid-19 pandemic, find information and present their work in a creative way. The results are impressive.

The Leiden Law Blog is celebrating its first anniversary. The blog attracts many visitors and scores well in Google. Tips for bloggers: link to previous blogs, post them on social media and respond to comments.

On 25-26 October 2022, a select group of high-level participants gathered in Leiden to discuss research on Libya’s national reconciliation and access to justice, and to explore implications for policy and law.

Three Indonesian students participated in the Leiden summer school Crises in Biology. ‘In the end, we were all just one big group.’

LEGO creations, a clothesline of visions and a journey into the past and the future: just some of the highlights of Uni-vision day, where creatives developed their vision of the future of study.

Leiden archaeologists have identified a number of bone fragments that were excavated in Germany two years ago. The fragments are from a sabre-toothed cat and appear to be parts of the skull of a prehistoric feline that is over 300,000 years old.

PhD research recently completed by pharmacologist Margreke Brill shows that morbidly obese patients should be given a different dosage of the drugs Cefazolin and Midazolam. This could also apply to other drugs such as anti-cancer drugs as well as antibiotics and Margreke Brill is advocating a change…

Leiden emeritus professor George Miley receives an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin on 8 December. ‘I never dreamed that I would receive an honorary doctorate somewhere, and this is all the more emotional because it's in the city where I spent the first 21 years of my life.’

Warja Tolstoj, alumna Art History, has been awarded the 2021 edition of the Ted Meijerprijs. Named after the former director of the KNIR (Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome), the prize is awarded yearly to the best MA/ReMa thesis or PhD in the Humanities.

The Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) received no less than three awards during the Figon Dutch Medicine Days. Bas Goulooze won the PhD Prize for best PhD candidate, Natalia Ortiz Zacarías and Huub Sijben both received a poster prize. ‘Scientists must be able to communicate their research…

The Leiden Bio Science Park (BSP) will become a real campus in the coming years, with more houses, and attractive places where scientists, students and entrepreneurs can meet to discuss their plans.

A new study published in Archaeometry describes the unexpected results obtained from analyses of five human teeth discovered in a ritual cache at an enslaved African plantation site on the island of Saba in the Caribbean.

As from April 2023 all students at Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam will start using the eduXchange portal to register for a minor.

On 7 June, the National Museum of Antiquities opened a mini exhibition 'Scanning for Syria'. The exhibition shows how Leiden archaeologists and Delft technical specialists make reconstructions of 3000-year-old Assyrian clay tablets. The originals, stored in museum depots in Raqqa (Syria), have been…

Understanding what our buildings and cities are made of is an important step in making them more sustainable. Industrial ecologist Tomer Fishman (CML) has received an ERC Starting Grant to map the construction materials used in buildings in the Global South. 'Without the data, you can't formulate po…

The Mesoamerican research group 'Time in Intercultural Context: the indigenous calendars of Mexico and Guatemala' funded by the ERC and directed by prof. dr. Maarten Jansen, met up in Mexico from the 13th until the 23rd of February for a field seminar in the states of Tlaxcala and Hidalgo.

Finds uncovered in the east of Germany show that Neanderthals stored and preserved vast amounts of meat and/or temporarily aggregated in larger groups to exploit the spoils

Archaeologist Victor Klinkenberg examined an old Assyrian settlement in Syria, near to the IS stronghold Raqqa. 'Social life was more important than military life.' PhD defence 27 October.

The international regime governing displacement shows a number of gaps, most notably with regard to (internally) displaced people who are not covered by the definition of refugee of the Refugee Convention. These protection gaps translate into solution gaps for displaced people.

To understand how the brain works, it is essential to map it out in detail. This appears to be possible with a microscopy technique in which Leiden physicists excel. This breakthrough could significantly advance the human quest to understand brain functions.