As of July 1, Professor of Bio-organic Synthesis Hermen Overkleeft will be appointed as the Scientific Director of the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC). He will succeed Jaap Brouwer, who has been managing the institute for the past twelve years. Overkleeft has been appointed for a period of four…

Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor at eLaw, has published a new article together with Cristiana Santos, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, titled 'Assessing (the Severity of) Impact on Fundamental Rights' in the journal Computer Law & Security Review (CLSR), published by Elsevier.

Nadine Akkerman released her new book Invisible Agents in July 2018. View the reviews on BBC History and Telegraph UK. Keith Simpson added it to his summer reading list recommendations.

2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the first United Nations World Conference on Women (Mexico City, 1975), a process that led to the creation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995). The Global Transformations and Governance Challenges Programme organised a roundtable to reflect on…

In Germany, the United States and even in Vietnam: all over the world, the Leiden discovery of the birth of two planets was shared. Astronomer Sebastiaan Haffert and his team were able to record multiple planets in the making for the first time and published their findings in Nature Astronomy. A unique…

Prof. Suzan Stoter will be the Dean of Leiden Law School at Leiden University as of 1 January 2024. The Leiden University Executive Board has appointed her for a period of four years. Stoter succeeds Joanne van der Leun, who, together with the other members of the Faculty Board, brought great verve…

The Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) offers a new minor from September 2022: Creative Strategies for a Society in Change (CSSC).

Two open letters are currently circulating among civil servants in the Netherlands calling for the Dutch government to take a different stance towards Israel. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law in Leiden, says in a national radio broadcast that this is an unusual and unique…

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has commenced hearings on Israel’s ban on UN organisation UNRWA. Larissa van den Herik, Professor of Public International Law, commented on news programma NOS Nieuws.

On 10 October 2014, the Advocate-General at the Supreme Court of the Netherlands delivered his opinion on the compensation case, instituted by the expropriated shareholders of SNS. On February 1, 2013 the Dutch Minister of Finance and the Dutch Central Bank decided to expropriate all stock of SNS Bank…

Read all the study choice tips and take the tests to get to know more about yourself. These tests can give you insight into your interests, competences, values and personality. That can help you make your study choice.

A new article, published by researchers from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science and the Leiden University Centre of Linguistics in the journal PLoS ONE, shows that 50% of Dutch Facebook users are exposed to junk news at least once. In addition, junk news causes more user engagement than…

For ten months, PhD student Sanne Rotmeijer worked on the editorial boards of various news media on Curaçao and Sint Maarten. She also tracked how news goes around on the streets and circulates on social media. The aim? To find out how stories became 'the news'.

As a result of the decentralisation of responsibilities in the public domain, most Dutch municipalities have created community teams. These community teams are tasked with providing easy access to care and support for citizens and with providing solutions to fit their individual needs. This requires…

Suddenly getting lost, failing to recognise family members, or forgetting words and names are well-known symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. Psychologists have now discovered that the disease also manifests in more subtle ways: through the rhythm of finger tapping.

Two statues of gorillas abducting women: they were what led PhD candidate Dick van Broekhuizen to write a new type of history of nineteenth-century sculpture. ‘If you view nineteenth-century art history from a less narrow perspective, the narrative changes completely.’ PhD ceremony on 21 June.

How do you deal with bullying? How can you motivate young people? At the NeurolabNL symposium a multidisciplinary research team launched an interactive book for teachers and youth workers. This digital book offers the latest insights and plenty of useful tips and advice. Children’s Ombudsman Margrite…

Toxys, Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have agreed immediately to commercialise and also develop further the ToxProfiler technology invented at the two institutions. ToxProfiler allows for rapid toxicity hazard identification of novel and existing drugs, chemicals, and other substances.…

On September 5, at the festive opening of the Faculty Year, a range of new murals will be officially presented in the Van Steenis’ Reuvens Hall. The wall paintings reflect a variety of Dutch soil stratigraphies, from Oss to burial mounds. Aside from being a striking new addition to our Faculty building,…

Stress among students is a growing problem. A new Student Wellbeing taskforce will be looking at the mental health of students at Leiden University.

For many a first-year, student life has well and truly begun. This also applies to students in The Hague, who were thrown in at the deep end during the HOP introduction week. We paid them a visit on a sunny afternoon at Landgoed Clingendael.

Chemotherapy that does nothing until you irradiate it with light. Sylvestre Bonnet receives a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros for the development of this treatment. The Leiden chemist wants to build a new molecule to fight tumours that are at the time still difficult to treat.

Over the past few years, citizen scientists from the Heritage Quest project have scoured the entire Veluwe and Utrechtse Heuvelrug areas for unknown archaeological heritage. One of the results of this research is that the number of known burial mounds in this area has doubled.

To what extent does exoplanet Proxima b resemble our Earth? And is there some form of life present? Astronomers hope to find answers to these questions with the new European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). An NWO research grant of €18 million will allow a Dutch consortium to continue building instruments…

Research by Dutch television programme ‘Nieuwsuur’ shows that local councils in the Netherlands often lack civil servants and experts to support the implementation of the energy transition. As a result, they have become more dependent on commercial consultancy firms.

LCD screens use liquid crystals which have a high degree of order, even though they form a fluid. A new theory maps out the interplay between order, temperature and symmetry. Publication in Physical Review X.

Mathematician Hester Bijl will be appointed Vice-Rector Magnificus and member of the Executive Board of Leiden University with effect from 1 November 2016. She succeeds Simone Buitendijk.

Professor Michiel Kreutzer has been appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University. He will take up the role on 1 January 2020. At present, he is Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Director of Education at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Delft University of Technology.…

The Board of Governors is pleased to announce that Professor Cisca Wijmenga has been appointed by outgoing Minister of Education, Culture and Science Robbert Dijkgraaf as its new member.

A new elective course, 'History of Morocco and the Moroccans in The Netherlands

The collection guides of archives and collections of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) have been made available via the portal Collection Guides. This has greatly improved the findability, visibility and ease of use of these collection finding aids.

Soil that is too wet, or too dry. Or with a lot or few nutrients. Due to climate change, the differences are becoming bigger, and plants must increasingly be able to adapt to survive. How do you make plants more stress-resistant? For this purpose, researchers from Leiden, along with other universities,…

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…

A couple of years ago, Dr Amanda Henry noted that she was unable to determine all microremains in her archaeological samples. Herself an expert on starches, she had trouble recognising other microparticles. Seeing the importance of interdisciplinarity, she organised a conference on microremains. This…

A new study in Nature Plants has explored the most important organising principles that control vegetation behaviour. The insights from this study can be used to improve predictions on climate change. Leiden scientists Peter van Bodegom and Nadia Soudzilovskaia participated in the study.

Professor Geert de Snoo, Dean of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University, has been appointed Director of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) with effect from 1 November 2019. He will stand down from his role as Dean of the Faculty of Science with effect from 1 September. De Snoo will…

The successor of assessor Marleen van Dorst has been appointed: from September 2019, Bas Schaalje will be the assessor for one year. The master student ICT in Business and the Public Sector wants to make sure that students feel heard by the Faculty.

CADS lecturer Sander Hölsgens is one of the initiators of the NWO Smart Culture Project Documenting Complexity (project number CISC.KC.212). This project investigates how and why engaged documentary filmmakers use new technologies in their work. One of the outputs of this project is the series ‘In Whose…

Dr. Kirsten Leiss and Prof. Peter Klinkhamer received 900.000 euro’s from “Stichting Toegepaste Wetenschappen (STW)” and the company “Rijk Zwaan” to develop plants that are resistant to thrips, a major agricultural pest all over the world.

Niek Strohmaier and Gitta Veldt will start as assistant professors within the project Empirical Legal Studies (ELS). Their appointments are part of the sector plan of Leiden Law School.

A lecturer winning a prize, an expert appearing in the media or a professor giving their inaugural speech: these are faces we often see. But we rarely see the staff who work behind the scenes to make their work possible. They are now featured in the photo exhibition ‘The forces behind the faces’.

The standard approach to build a quantum computer with Majoranas as building blocks is to convert them into qubits. However, a promising application of quantum computing—quantum chemistry—would require these qubits to be converted again into so-called fermions. Physicists from Leiden and Delft suggest…

Prof. Hanneke Hulst has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute of Psychology by the Board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. She will start on 1 February 2024 for a period of 3 years, succeeding Andrea Evers and interim director Serge Rombouts.

The European Elections are approaching and we get to take a trip to our local polling station. But the turnout in the Netherlands is likely to be low and who exactly do we get to vote for? Rik de Ruiter, Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, explains the two political dilemmas…

Joris van den Tol spent three months doing archival research in Albany in the USA. Read on how he experienced his stay.

Studio Leon Thier Architectuur/Interieur is the architectural firm behind the interior design of Wijnhaven, and with this project they have been nominated for the architectural award the ‘New Berlage flag’. The award has been introduced by the Hague Architecture Café (HaAC) and the BNA. The award goes…

Current antibiotics only address very few target proteins in bacteria to kill them. Researchers know that there are more possible target proteins to tackle the bacteria. The question is: which ones. Thanks to the NWO Vidi Grant, Assistant Professor Molecular Physiology Stephan Hacker and his team can…