On 4 May, Leiden University remembered the victims of the Second World War from our university community. Alumni, students and present and former staff of the University came together for this Hour of Remembrance.

Anne-Laura van Harmelen has received a Vidi grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This talent programme will enable Van Harmelen to research the social and neurobiological mechanisms of resilience in young people with childhood trauma.

Edmund Flett, alumnus of the International Relations master's programme, has won the 2023 J.C. Baak Prize for his thesis ‘Settlements now, settlement later. Land swaps, settler relocation, and the viability of the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine’.

An international collaboration of astronomers is organising a special online lecture series for physicists and astronomers in Cuba. The reason for this is the tightening of measures against this country, as a result of which researchers can hardly get any information from outside the island. ‘Everyone…

JSixty researchers have received a grant of approximately 50,000 Euros during round 3 of the NWO Open Competition SSH-XS pilot programme. Two of them are working at FGGA: Jolien van Breen and Honorata Mazepus. The sixty researchers received the grant to start working on a promising concept or an innovative…

The moment has finally arrived: after months of hard work, the strategic plan is finished. It was an interesting period, thinks core group member Sylvestre Bonnet. 'How we finally arrived at this strategic plan was very different from what I had thought beforehand.'

Organisation, Social

ICT, Security

In een spraakmakende rechtszaak over de Wet open overheid (Woo) besloot een rechter zelf documenten over de toeslagenaffaire te beoordelen. Wim Voermans en Annemarie Drahmann deelden hun opvattingen over de zaak met de Volkskrant.

Amsterdam’s attitude to sex work, politeness in historical Arabic letters and malaria in the Middle Ages: again this year, there was a wide variety of topics in the Research Traineeship programme. On Friday 30 August, the trainees finished the last of these projects for now.

When are you (sexually) mature? A KNAW grant will enable associate professor Rafal Matuszewski to organise an interdisciplinary workshop on this question.

Leiden University has taken eighth place in this year’s SustainaBul, the sustainability ranking for universities and universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands. It was in 18th place last year.

In the Netherlands it is now possible to visit non-essential shops if you make an appointment beforehand. But when you book an appointment you have to provide a lot of personal data. Are shops allowed to ask you for all this data and what happens to it?

On Thursday 19 June, the sun-drenched garden of the Huizinga Building was the setting for the Education Market. Over snacks and drinks, colleagues inspired each other with educational innovations.

Rahul Gandhi, former president of the Indian National Congress, was on the Hague Campus on 10 September.

What hidden nature is there in our cities and how can we use such organisms? This is what the HiddenBiodiversity project will be exploring over the next four years. The project’s kick-off meeting was held at the Hortus botanicus on Monday 26 September.

You can hardly avoid it if you want to quickly implement satellite internet. Elon Musk's company Starlink is "all-powerful in space" (Volkskrant). Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant wrote an extensive article on the situation and the possible dangers and alternatives. For this, they interviewed several experts,…

On 30 October 2025, Eleonora Dagienė successfully defended her PhD thesis at Leiden University, titled ‘Quantitative Research Assessment and its Unintended Consequences’.

Craft your own empirical research in workshops of the ELS lab @Leiden!

On Thursday 2 June, the research conference for academic staff members of the Institute of Public Administration took place at the Beeld en Geluid venue in The Hague. The aim of the conference was to showcase the ongoing research conducted at the Public Administration and explore the potential for more…

Professor Claartje Levelt, together with Paula Fikkert (Radboud University), has received an NWO Open Competition grant for research into the development of word production in toddlers.

With support of several publishers and private foundations, Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Scaliger Institute welcome around 15 to 20 Fellows and guests per year to consult and research materials from our Special Collections. The Scaliger Institute received many applications this year from…

November marks exactly 100 years since the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. To celebrate this special discovery, the Faculty of Humanities, together with various parties, is organising the 'Month of Tutankhamun': a month full of activities around Egypt's most legendary pharaoh.

As a result of the current corona measures, attendance at the Opening of the Academic Year on 6 September will be restricted to a maximum of 75 persons. The ceremony can, however, be viewed online by taking part in a video wall.

Van Es is the successor to Professor Huijgen whose retirement is approaching after nearly 27 years’ professorship. This new appointment is from October 2022, but Van Es has been working at the faculty for some time.

We regret to share the news that our colleague, friend, and former professor of Assyriology at Leiden University, passed away on 15 May 2021.

Research

'Don’t Let the sunny weather fool you' a film made by Visual Ethnography alumna Guusje Meeuwissen has been selected for the RAI film festival in London this year. It's a short film about the everyday lives of a farmer and a fisherman in the Philippines, and their capacity to adapt to a changing natural…

Our Keyholders are a close network of over 500 committed donors who actively support Leiden University. Pauline Höhner-Regout, who started working at the LUF since April, talks about her role as a Keyholder fundraiser.

Stress and overwork are massive problems today, but relatively little is known about stress factors in the past. With a look at the deep history of stress, Sarah Schrader hopes to get a better understanding of the human stress experience. Her project application received an NWO XS grant.

In totaal hebben 21 Leidse onderzoekers succesvol een aanvraag ingediend voor de NWO SGW Open Competitie XS. Twee van de beloonde projecten komen van onderzoekers van FGGA: Silvia D’Amato en Jaroslaw Kantorowicz.

Saniye Çelik, Professor by Special Appointment of Diversity, Inclusion, and Policing at Leiden University, has received the Woman in the Media Award at Beeld & Geluid in Hilversum. She was selected as the winner by the jury from three female experts with the most votes.

Quietly read a book in our new reading nook, listen to interesting and bizarre stories set in early twentieth-century Leiden, walk past literary locations in Leiden and watch the best film adapted from a Leiden novel as decided on by you. April is Literary Leiden month! A month in which we pay special…

Social

In the context of Panama’s independence month, the Panamanian Embassy in the Kingdom of The Netherlands decided to recognize Natalia Donner’s contributions to the study of Panamanian history and culture, as well as her role in a massive repatriation project.

Organisation, Social

Rose Vossen has been named winner of the Young Star Award 2021. The Life Science and Technology student received the award on Monday from Ewine van Dishoeck, the founder of the award. Vossen wins a cheque for 2,500 euros for her exceptional results as a bachelor's student. During her final bachelor…

A team of students from Leiden won the iGEM international biology contest in 2020 with their Rapidemic mobile testing kit. The kit makes it easy to detect viruses. The team has now been nominated for the Most Innovative Student in the Netherlands prize. Cast your vote and help them develop their inv…

Education, ICT

Suzan Verberne has been appointed professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from 1 October. Verberne has been at LIACS since 2017 as group leader of the Text Mining and Retrieval group.

During ExpeditionNEXT in Middelburg, NeurolabNL youth, together with researchers from Leiden University and Erasmus University, handed over a unique research agenda to NWO Chairman Marcel Levi. In it, young people share what they would most like to learn about themselves and the brain.

To check whether the classroom scanners are secure, a ‘pen test’ was performed in the Lipsius building on Monday 28 March. This involved switching on the person counters for a day so that ethical hackers could try to gain access to the system.

It is mid-July and as I sit in my office in the Herta Mohr building, I notice how quiet it is around campus. Yet, this is in direct contrast with a flurry of activity by LUCSoR colleagues and students in recent weeks. I highlight just a few examples here.

In the new Annual Report 2022 we report on not only research and teaching at Leiden University but also ICT, real estate, personnel, finance, impact and knowledge transfer and more.

On 10 October, Valerie Frissen was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Internet Society Foundation. The professor by special appointment received the award in recognition of her tireless efforts in the field of internet freedom, digital rights and internet governance.

Research

Marc Broekema from the Department of Business Studies has received a grant from the Netherlands Institute of Registered Valuators (NiRV) to conduct research into how the value of a business is assessed in legal proceedings.

From September 2024 onwards, Leiden University’s Europa Institute will teach a new LL.M. programme on the Governance of Migration and Diversity [GMD]. Programme Chair Moritz Jesse says, ‘We need lawyers who are well-informed about the historical, sociological and political background of migration.’