During a closing exhibition, participants of the Master Honours Class 'Leiden: City of Refugees?' present their invitation to an imaginary group of 'others'. By combining science with art, students learn to look at society in a different manner.

On 28 and 29 April 2022, the fourth annual PhD Workshop on European and International Insolvency Law took place, organised by the Foundation Bob Wessels Insolvency Law Collection (BWILC). A shared first prize was awarded to Gert-Jan Boon (Leiden University) and Theodora Kostoula (European University…

The PDI-SSH grant will be used by Meuwese to create a web portal and collection of tools and resources, named ‘WetSuite’, that will help researchers apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to legal textual data from public bodies.

The brand-new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ‘Risk in Modern Society’ starts on Monday 29 January. This course was developed by the Centre for Safety and Security of the Leiden•Delft•Erasmus alliance.

What is the state of democracy in developing and transition countries in 2024? Terrible, according to the BTI Transformation Index.

The European Union has awarded a COFUND grant to a consortium of researchers from the universities of Groningen, Leiden and Eindhoven for a collective fellowship programme called ‘oLife’. The 6 M€ programme, which is co-financed by the participating universities, will recruit and train 18 post-doctoral…

In secondary education, teacher collaboration is used to further teachers’ professional development. In her dissertation, Loes de Jong (PhD candidate at ICLON) examines how various collaborative initiatives stimulate teacher learning. Her thesis defence is on 20 May 2021.

Jianfeng Ge and Milan Allen of Leiden University look for majorana quasiparticles using shot noise measurements

Part of our social contact is currently online, with no physical proximity. Does digitalisation mean that we are losing an effective way of making contact with one another? This is what Reinoud Kaldewaij will be studying with a Veni subsidy from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). 'An issue that will…

Dr. Tesse Stek has been awarded a Veni and a Free Competition (within the Humanities field) grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for his research projects.

Leila Demarest, Assistant Professor of African Politics at Leiden University, has recently been awarded with a Leiden University Fund research grant to study adolescents’ political attitudes and inter-group tolerance in Lagos, Nigeria.

For some devout Muslims, going to the cinema or viewing certain images is provocative and problematic. Ahmad Nuril Huda investigated the development Santri (young, pious Muslims) have undergone in this field over the past ten years. The Cinematic Santri is the result of his PhD research.

A consortium of research infrastructures focused on water quality has received €4.18 million in funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This grant will support the transformation of outdoor laboratories at Leiden University, NIOO-KNAW, Radboud University, and Wageningen University & Research…

In September 2025 Leiden University hosted a greatly successful academic conference

With a €1.5 million European grant, industrial ecologist Stefano Cucurachi will work on more sustainable production methods for the pharmaceutical industry. The Italian company Angelini Pharma intends to use the resulting knowledge to make its production process more sustainable.

An international team with researchers from Leiden revealed how a bacterium repurposed an internal system to control its movements. Movement control is very important in host invasion, which can lead to disease. Publication on 27 April in Nature Communications.

Yusen Yu wins the prestigious Graduate Student Prize of the Middle East Medievalists (MEM) with his article

Hosted at the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) in Rabat on 26 and 27 October, 20 junior and senior empirical researchers who all work on migration in Morocco came together to discuss two important topics that are frequently neglected in migration scholarship. The researchers were from different…

The book: Hegemony and World Order: Reimagining Power in Global Politics will be published this week. Jan Aart Scholte: 'We hope that students, lecturers and policy makers will start to think differently because of this book'

Eduard Fosch-Villaronga and Bart Custers from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies wrote an article on Fair Medicine and AI highlighting that AI for biomedical research and healthcare should be beneficent and equitable for everyone.

The Citizen Science Netherlands (CS-NL) network was officially launched this month with the aid of an Open Science NL grant. The new vision for this network was presented on 28 May.

Agressief gedrag van gedetineerden is sterk te verlagen met een aantal aanpassingen in het dagelijkse regime in penitentiaire inrichtingen. Dit blijkt uit de evaluatie van een experiment met een alternatief detentieregime, uitgevoerd door Tilburg University en de Universiteit Leiden.

Swarms of drones, pedestrians or the cells in your body. Those are all examples of active matter: materials whose building blocks can move autonomously. That’s what Luca Giomi studies. Giomi has been appointed Professor of theoretical physics in the area of soft matter and biological physics at the…

On Thursday 10 November, the GTGC organized a research seminar. During this seminar Saori Katada presented her paper on Regional Approach to Financial Statecraft: Japan and India in the Face of Rising China.

Three of our researchers have been awarded a certificate for receiving enough downloads to be in the top 10% of papers in 2022

Comparing terrorist attacks with falling off a step ladder is absurd, writes Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn in NRC Handelsblad on 27 September 2017.

Nine staff members of the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Society participated in the Law and Society Association’s (LSA) annual conference from 27-30 May. VVI staff presented ten conference papers, organised multiple sessions, as well as served as chairs and discussants for numerous…

Over the centuries painters and photographers have depicted students at study in Leiden. An exhibition at the Hortus botanicus reveals the similarities and differences in 450 years of student life.

How can KLM remain the most sustainable airline? Master’s students from the Leiden Leadership Programme immerse themselves in practice and advise companies on major issues.

It's a race against time for Charles Jeurgens, Leiden Professor in Archival Studies. He is investigating how the colonial authorities created the archives in the National Archive in Jakarta. ‘The acidic paper deteriorates rapidly in this hot and humid climate.’

Dutch politics has long been a paragon of stability. Think, for example, of our party system until, say, the last decade. At the same time, we also see occasional changes and significant shifts. Society has changed and this is reflected in, among other things, how we vote and how policy is made. About…

On 25 February 2021, the UN High Level Panel on International Financial Accountability, Transparency and Integrity for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (FACTI panel) has adopted its final report, to which Valentina Carraro (GTGC) and Hortense Jongen (VU Amsterdam) have contributed by writing a background paper…

Trail, FGGA's internship platform, will be one year old in November. It is therefore high time to get to know the organisations and companies that use Trail. What do these organisations stand for? What work do interns do? And what do FGGA students have to offer?

For more than forty years Heinrich Witte was responsible for the flora in the Hortus botanicus in Leiden. The 19th-century garden manager made the Netherlands famous with plants from Japan. The Old University Library is showing an exhibition of his work (19 August to 4 November).

During the corona pandemic, the Chinese government's digital communication with its citizens changed. Hard propaganda was increasingly replaced by ‘soft news’. PhD candidate Dechun Zhang mapped the developments in digital society.

Edwin Bakker, invited speaker, at The EU conference on the future of higher education on March 9, 2016, advocated in his presentation ‘MOOCs as drivers of change: The teacher’s perspective’ for an open and positive attitude to digital learning environments and to leverage the potential of technolog…

An online platform with instructive and social challenges to prepare students for the changing job market. This idea won the Piece of Skill team the Deans’ Challenge on 27 August. In this competition students invent solutions for global issues, selected by deans of Leiden University.

The research Early Pleistocene human occupation at the edge of the boreal zone in northwest Europe published 8th July 2010 in Nature is part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project, in which the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University is involved.

Twice a year, Gert Renkema, Head of Financial Economic Affairs at FGGA, shares insights about the processes and financial matters for our faculty.

Researchers from the Institute of Environmental Sciences of Leiden University started crowdfunding to raise 15.000 euro to build a laboratory in nature: The Living Lab. This is necessary to test the effects of chemical compounds in a natural situation.

Ilze Bot wants to reduce the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases. Her research focuses on mast cells, which protect us from infections but can also make us ill.

An overview of the media appearances of scientists working with the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs about terrorist attacks in Europe, their consequences, and more.

Translating ancient texts, filling in missing parts of clay tablets: articles are popping up more and more often about the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence for researching documents in the oldest scripts. Are we better off leaving the deciphering of ancient texts to computers from now…

A far-reaching understanding of human behaviour is necessary to get to grips with conflicts in society and to encourage parties to meet each other halfway. Psychologists, anthropologists and political scientists from Leiden are making invaluable contributions to that understanding. You can find out…

The Upper and Lower Houses of the Dutch Parliament are struggling with how tolerance should best be interpreted. As a result, the freedom in the Netherlands for people who hold alternative views is diminishing. This is Floris Mansvelt Beck’s conclusion on the basis of his PhD research. Defence on 2…

How does language work and how do we learn a language? The more we know about language, the better we can understand how people interpret the world in words. Roberta D'Alessandro carries out research on the architecture of language. There is now a dossier about her work online.

Leiden University and the Municipality of Leiden will develop new plans for an alternative Humanities Campus in the city centre. This means they will not proceed with the compulsory purchase of the De Doelen housing complex to facilitate the construction of the new Humanities Campus. The plans to demolish…

Tracking mucus-eating bacteria, mapping the complexity of planetary nebulae and a signalling pathway in cancer. These three Leiden projects have been awarded Open Competition Science-M funding by the Dutch Research Council.

11th CREAN Children’s Rights Research PhD Symposium

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.