The students of iGEM Leiden 2021 have scored well in the eponymous biology competition: they won a Gold Medal and the Best Safety & Security Award. The student team received the awards for their project DOPL LOCK, in which the team tries to make genetic modification safer.

The right to strike is regulated by the European Social Charter, but employers also have the right to take collective action. Employers actually resorting to this in reality hardly ever happens, however. Instead, we constantly hear about workers going on strike.

Anke Ramakers, Assistant Professor in criminology at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden Law School, together with Finnish researchers Mikko Aaltonen and Pekka Martikainen, has published an article in the Elsevier journal 'Advances in Life Course Research', on the role of labour…

Het Internationaal Strafhof krijgt veel kritiek op haar tanende invloed als het gaat om gerechtigheid in Oekraïne en Palestina. Larissa van den Herik, hoogleraar internationaal publiekrecht, sprak met Trouw: ‘Internationaal recht is altijd in ontwikkeling en is altijd imperfect.’

Digitalisering raakt iedereen, maar speelt nauwelijks een rol in verkiezingsdebatten. In een opiniestuk in de Volkskrant pleit Reijer Passchier, universitair docent staatsrecht en hoogleraar digitalisering aan de OU voor politieke urgentie en visie op digitale vraagstukken.

Evolution is all around you every day. This is the message of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) of Leiden University and Naturalis that is offered free of charge to anyone interested.

The ‘New Way of Working’ has become a reality at Leiden Law School with light, transparent and flexible workspaces, Rector Carel Stolker said at the grand opening of the revamped third floor of the Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw.

K-pop band BTS joining the Korean military is a compulsory obligation, one with increased meaning as tension builds on the Korean Peninsula and around the world, postdoc Aleydis Nissen writes in an article in The Diplomat.

Roughly arrested and subjected to extreme isolation. Using his experience, expert Jason Bhugwandass spoke to 50 young people who have spent time on Zikos wards (‘very intense, short-term observation and stabilisation wards’). He concluded that they’re ‘mostly locked up’ and leave ‘even more traumatised’…

The Life Cycle of Archaeological Objects: Uncovering the treasures of the faculty of archeology

Donald Trump’s re-election: it could become reality after the November 2024 elections. According to various experts across Europe and the US, Europe needs to prepare for the potential implications of this scenario for European security. Professor Luuk van Middelaar, an expert in European Law, discussed…

'The EU should not give way under pressure as the war continues,' writes Joris Larik, assistant professor of European law, in an opinion piece that was recently published in Dutch newspaper FD.

We are proud to see the work "Magische Korstmossen" by our alumni Carolien Teunisse and Sabrina Verhage exhibited at the Cinekid MediaLab 2021. Via augmented reality, "Magische Korstmossen" lets children interact with the magical world of lichens.

Sophie Rose is one of the fellows of the Ammodo Science Fellowship 2024. She will use this fellowship to conduct research at Leiden University.

Insurers determine for themselves whether someone has committed fraud, impose sanctions immediately and hardly ever report it. As a result, police, prosecutors, and criminal courts are side-lined. And policyholders are sometimes left out in the cold. Bart Custers, professor of Law & Data Science at…

The unanimous condemnation of the American attack on Venezuela is 'hypocritical', says Andreas Kinneging, Professor of Philosophy of Law, in Dutch newspaper ‘De Telegraaf’: 'We should humbly thank the Americans for still looking out for us.'

The student loan system, implemented in 2015 in part to improve the quality of Dutch education, is facing political backlash. Despite having signed the student loan system agreement in 2015, both GroenLinks and PvdA have had a change of heart.

De ruimte is van iedereen en alleen voor vreedzaam gebruik, maar militaire ambities, commerciële projecten en grondstofwinning zetten die principes onder druk. Tanja Masson-Swaan, universitair docent internationaal luncht en ruimterecht, zegt in het Parool dat het hoog tijd is het Verdrag uit 1967 te…

Recently, the Van Vollenhoven Institute and the Centre for Law and Society Studies at Benghazi University hosted the final conference of the Access to Justice in Libya (A2JiL) project in Leiden.

Professor Ingrid Tieken (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, LUCL) and Dr Herman Siemens (Institute for Philosophy) have each been awarded an NWO Free Competition award in the Humanities for their research projects.

On 27 September 2019, Bart Schuurman, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs spoke to Dutch regional newspaper 'de Gelderlander' about the decline in attention for jihadism.

Dutch activist Frank van der Linde has initiated summary proceedings against the extension of the emergency order following the recent disturbances in Amsterdam. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional Law, comments on the case in Dutch newspaper ‘de Volkskrant’.

As of February, Pepijn Reeser steps down as the project director of the Taalmuseum (the Language Museum). Exhibition designer and project manager Tessa Askamp takes over his role.

We are very happy to announce two new teachers in the Practicum Artium programme: Nadine Stijns and Yin Yin Wong.

The Leiden Institute of Physics has been awarded three out of twelve available grants from the FOM Projectruimte. Principal Investigators Milan Allan, Stefan Semrau and Carlo Beenakker all receive around 400,000 euro for their research.

The exhibition Return is available in HUBspot from 25 January until 28 January. Return is an exhibition of students from the Leiden Master's Media Technology, with a focus on the influence of technology on mankind.

A hidden disability can make studying a considerable challenge, partly because of the disability itself, but also because others may not realise that extra support is justified. To overcome this problem, the Faculty of Humanities is introducing the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower.

Besides teaching BA and MA classes at Leiden University and supervising PhD candidates doing artistic research both in Leiden and Ghent, a third major component of Marcel Cobussen’s activities is (of course) doing research.

A podcast about classical music featuring interviews with guest musicians about music they love. Come hang out with Emma and Chloe, creators of MusicBox, while they explore a new piece episode.

‘From the ground up’: The politics of burial and memory in the early Islamic world

Francesco Ragazzi (Institute of Political Science), Julian Ross (Center for the Arts in Society) and Mark Westmoreland (Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology) set up the interdisciplinary research centre ReCNTR.

Caroline van Eck has been awarded the Descartes-Huygens Prize. She will receive the award in March 2014. The prize includes a period as a guest researcher in France. Van Eck has been awarded the prize for her excellent research and her contribution to French-Dutch collaboration.

As of April 2022, Mark de Rooij has been appointed SAILS Professor AI and Data Theory at the Institute of Psychology. This position will enable him to contribute to the goal of the interdisciplinary programme: to build on and expand the current expertise on AI within Leiden University, working from…

The newly launched NWO funded research project ‘Bridging art, design and technology through Critical Making’ aims to interrogate Critical Making by experimentally applying it to a broad range of artistic practices.

Impossible Situations: Concerts in the Making recounts the journey of a group of artists including performers, composers, an architect, a photographer and a sound engineer, as they explore different ways of making music together.

At the conference Surrealism and Scotland on 23 and 24 March, Janice McNab will share the paper ‘Surrealism and the making of Mother’.

Apart from his activities as coordinator of the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Rogier Schneemann is co-founder, guitarist and composer of the Dutch-Italian group Azure Hiptronics, originally formed in 2006.

In 2017 the book Artists in the University-Positioning Artistic Research in Higher Education by Jenny Wilson was published by Springer. Prof.dr. Henk Borgdorff wrote the foreword, which includes part of his inaugural lecture.

What’s the fate of our sun, when in 5 billion years from now our Milky Way will clash with the Andromeda Galaxy? Leiden astronomers have been working on calculations on this collision. They recently gave a visual sneak preview on a big tech conference.

Students and researches from all faculties at Leiden University attended a lunch seminar to discuss with four topic experts the rise of AI and the challenges this poses for various governance structures. The event was hosted by Leiden University’s interdisciplinary programmes GTGC and SAILS.

On Thursday, November 20, 2025, the Leiden Jewish Studies Network celebrated the launch of the book Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) co-authored by Ofer Ashkenazi (Jerusalem), Sarah Wobick-Segev (Hamburg), Shira Miron (Basel) and Rebekka Grossmann…

On 27th of October 2021 the Food Citizens? team welcomed dr. Wojciech Goszczyński and dr. Ruta Śpiewak for a day-long seminar at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.

Lecture

Arts and culture

‘We want to say something very different from the norm. We are the radicals now.’ Tahir Abbas is lyric about the DRIVE project he will be leading from Leiden University in The Hague. This is a short introduction to the research that will be carried out in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the United…

If you replace the standard hydrogen atoms in ice with a heavier variant, something odd happens. The volume occupied by the molecules increases by 0.1 per cent. Leiden chemist Jörg Meyer and his colleagues have created a theoretical model that describes this behaviour. Their research appeared on the…

Those who apply for asylum at the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) are often asked about their main reason for migration. This process puts asylum seekers in a specific category, while their experiences are often much more complex and multifaceted. With his research on queer migration, PhD…

What developments preceded modern Standard Dutch? PhD candidate Iris Van de Voorde conducted research on ‘pluricentricity’, or the idea that language norms arise in different places and spread outwards from there. PhD defence on 19 April.

The ongoing conflicts between the United States and its allies and Russia and between the United States and its allies and China reflect both the anarchical nature of the international system and the uncertainty with which decision-makers and diplomats have to deal with in attempting to solve the conflicts…