On the 1 June 2021, Professor Eric De Brabandere and Dr Daniel Peat of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden Law School launched the Leiden Investment Treaty Arbitration Database.

Leiden University won five prizes at the 10th edition of the IBA International Criminal Court (ICC) Moot Court Competition – English edition of 2023, including Best Regional Team of Europe.

Leiden Law School and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies are very pleased to announce that Dr. Mamadou Hébié will be re-joining the Grotius Centre on the 1st of May 2021.

What is the top 50 most popular studies among employers? That's what career platform Magnet.me investigated for the second consecutive year. What does it show? The programmes of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs are well represented in the ranking.

In October, the Provincial Executive in Friesland reprimanded four civil servants who had signed an incendiary letter asking the government to adopt a more active climate policy. Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, feels that the Executive made a mistake.

On Sunday 31 January 2016, Prof. Carsten Stahn spoke at the IBA Annual Conference on International Criminal Law.

Conference

The Caribbean as we know it today is fundamentally a product of colonial activity and globalisation. Practically everyone that inhabits the Caribbean has ancestors from different continents due to colonial activity, which profoundly affects the area to this day. Caribbean writers, both in the Caribbean…

Graphic Novels and Comics have developed from pulp status to an entirely self-contained medium. This form of storytelling is not limited to stories of superheroes but has been used, molded and reshaped to display historical events, classic stories and autobiographical memoirs. But where should you begin…

The outreach and engagement platform BrainTrain consists of five enthusiastic students of the masters programme Forensic Family Science. As part of their project, the students visit high-schools to teach adolescents about the brain, make them experience that their own reality is not always the only…

Accelerating the development of new cancer medicines by joining forces—that’s the mission of Oncode Accelerator, a Dutch consortium that recently welcomed three Leiden-based PhD candidates. Under the guidance of Gerard van Westen, Marc Boef, Remco van den Broek, and Lucina-May Nollen are exploring how…

This book describes the different approaches for drug delivery to the brain with an emphasis on the physiology of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the governing principles and concepts for drug delivery across the BBB

Leiden archaeology is booming. Our archaeologists take part in major international projects covering not only the Netherlands but large areas of the globe. Caspar Reuvens (1793-1835) was also keen on this division: he had one foot in the Netherlands and the other in the Mediterranean world.

After a promising start, also the second pilot of the digital Brightspace skills platform is a success. Third-year bachelor students had thirty new skill modules at their disposal to support them with their research assignment. Despite the additional challenges posed by COVID-19, students that used…

How dangerous are micro- and nanoplastics? Do they affect the environment? What harm can they do to our bodies? Questions that we can now finally answer because of Fazel Abdolahpur Monikh. Together with his colleagues, he developed a method to detect and quantify nano-sized plastics. Their paper has…

Mini organs-on-chips allow us to study how diseases develop and how drugs work. Although the technology is not new, it is becoming increasingly advanced. PhD candidate Bart Kramer hopes it will eliminate animal testing in the future.

Mathematical biologists from Leiden have developed a model that helps to explain how the spine and vertebrae, among other things, form during embryonic development. The same process, the other way around, plays a key role in cancer metastasis. Publication in iScience.

The Dutch biotech start-up In Ovo is the first company to develop a large-scale solution for determining the sex of a chick while it is still in the egg. This fast and cheap technique can be applied mechanically at hatcheries, which was not possible before.

With his knowledge of medicine and his decisive action, Leiden professor Sebald Justinus Brugmans saved the lives of many wounded soldiers after the Battle of Waterloo, on 18 June 2015 exactly 200 years ago.

The tenth Europa Lecture was delivered by Corinna Wissels, State Councillor at the Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Dutch Council of State, deputy justice of the Dutch Trade and Industry Appeals Tribunal and member of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement arbitration panel.

Dominique Moïsi, a professor at King’s College London, will be the first holder of the Owada chair. ‘In the present international context of polarisation and divisions within societies and amongst nations, any effort at bringing Asia and Europe closer to each other is truly important.’

On Thursday 3rd of March 2016 the 14th Norbert Schmelzer, organized annually by the CDA party, took place in the Hague. This year the lecture was given by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

To give a better idea of the research at Leiden University, a new website has been launched that lists the University’s institutes together with the disciplines that they cover. But the institutes also work together intensively.

Nu de NAVO inzet op 5% defensiebudget, zoekt Nederland naar financiering. Politicoloog Van der Zwan ziet kansen bij pensioenfondsen—mits defensie duurzaam heet.

Carolien Stolte has received an Early Career Award from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). She received this award for her research into the role of informal Afro-Asian networks in the Cold War. For this innovative research she received the award, an amount of 15,000 euros, and…

How do democracies develop? The Institute for History is devoting a three-day conference to this question.

Following a highly successful first edition, we are delighted to announce the second Leiden eLaw Summer School on ‘Regulating AI in the EU Digital Market’ taking place from 23 to 27 June 2025, both in person in Leiden and online.

More allowance should be made for differences between municipalities, argues Geerten Boogaard, Thorbecke Professor of Local Government. The Municipalities Act could, for instance, offer a ‘menu of options’ for the decision on whether to have an elected mayor. Professor Boogaard will deliver his inaugural…

Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary-General of NATO, gave a guest lecture at Leiden University on 19 April. His message was clear: increased international tensions call for greater investments in defence. According to Stoltenberg, the Netherlands is not one of the big spenders in this area.

Without scientific knowledge, we won’t be able to tackle the grand challenges of the 21st century: climate change, energy transition, social inequality and coronavirus, for example. Professor by Special Appointment of the Social Value of Science Laurens Hessels is therefore calling for more transdisciplinary…

How does the Chinese government communicate with its citizens? Yuxi Nie obtained her PhD with her thesis on communication strategies of the Chinese state media agency Xinhua. She discovered that on social media, Xinhua communicated in different ways, depending on the target group.

Chad-born youngsters in Paris come into contact with youngsters actually in Chad via Facebook: it would be difficult to find a better way to demonstrate the possibilities social media offer for people scattered across the world by war. Mirjam de Bruijn has been awarded a Vici grant for a study of the…

Sumerian is a dead language that is not related to any other language. Howeverr, Bram Jagersma managed to compile a grammar of the language, based on inscriptions and clay tablets. Traces of the Sumerian number system can still be seen in our sixty-minute hour. Jagersma received his PhD on 4 Novembe…

Leiden Law School is celebrating its 450th anniversary and we have lots of special events planned to showcase what our faculty has to offer. For example, a series of ‘450-talks’ to be held at a unique location in the KOG.

Rowie Stolk ontving op 16 mei Rowie Stolk de VAR-Lex Michiels prijs voor haar proefschrift ‘Procederende belangenorganisaties in de polder: Een interdisciplinair perspectief op de toegang tot de rechter’.

Martin Richardson, who graduated in 1997 from what was then the Leiden LLM Programme in European Community Law (now: Leiden Adv LLM European and International Business Law, EIBL), has recently been appointed as a Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland, meaning that he is now a judge of the highest…

Hans-Martien ten Napel has been awarded a Research Fellowship in Legal Studies at the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) at Princeton University, USA, which enables him to be in full-time residence at CTI for the academic year, 1 September 2014 to 31 May 2015.

For the first time in over half a century, one of oldest telescopes at the Leiden Observatory is getting a major improvement.

‘Make use of us!’ This is what the collaborating universities of Rotterdam, Delft and Leiden have to say to administrators and policymakers. And the call has not fallen on deaf ears, says Marja van Bijsterveldt, the Mayor of Delft. ‘Now more than ever we can use knowledge to solve societal issues in…

On August 27 – 31 2019, PhD candidate Maria Vasile participated in the IUAES 2019 Inter- congress in Poznan, Poland entitled "World Solidarities" and shares some of the insights from presentations she attended and found particularly relevant to the Food Citizens project.

Leiden Professor Richard Griffiths received the Outstanding Educator Award for Innovation during the annual Coursera Partner Conference on 22 March. The conference was hosted by Leiden University in the World Forum in The Hague and was attended by 500 participants from more than a hundred leading universities.…

Prof. C. Bakels is an archaeobotanist who devoted most of her career researching farming, its (pre)history and influence on the landscape. Born in 1942, she got her first appointment as a lecturer at Leiden University in 1968. On Monday 16 April, we celebrated her 50th work anniversary.

Hoe kan het dat universele mensenrechten wereldwijd niet hetzelfde in de praktijk worden gebracht?

‘’These are such mind-boggling topics!’’, a student exclaims. It is May 21st, and over fifty Humanities Lab students are gathered in a Teams room. The work that they have done as honours students over the past three years culminates in this afternoon: the annual Capstone Conference, where two prizes…

Scientists of the faculty of Governance and Global Affairs research completely different subject, among which terrorism, cybercrime and migration. In the upcoming weeks we will give the floor to several of our very best researchers. In this episode: development researcher David Ehrhardt.

Former Leiden Observatory PhD candidate Danna Qasim has won no less than two prestigious prizes with her thesis, titled 'Dark ice chemistry in interstellar clouds'. Qasim received the IAU PhD Prize from the IAU. The Astrochemistry Subdivision of the American Chemical Society (ACS) honoured her work…

On Saturday 15 February 2020, the Leiden University Thesis Prizes were presented during the Dies celebration day for alumni. Joint first prize went to Vincent Peeters, who was awarded a cum laude master's degree in Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure in August 2019.