Looking for a different approach in the ongoing discussions on the ethereal matter of Romanisation, Ana Zora Maspoli joined Miguel John Versluys’ research group as a postdoc guest researcher. While she has been active in our Faculty since February 2022, you may not have met her yet due to the Covid-19…

Hans Slabbekoorn researches animal sounds and the effect of the noise we humans make on these animals. He is also committed to making his discipline more diverse.

Lichens enthusiast Sander van Zon was eager to use his knowledge for his internship. He wrote an excellent thesis on lichens’ biodiversity in the city, of which his first scientific publication will appear soon. With it, he is nominated for the Leiden Science Young Talent Award 2022.

On Thursday 17 October 2019, the second ILS Lunch Seminar of this academic year took place. Hanneke Bennaars and Prof. Frans Sonneveldt gave two very insightful presentations.

‘Hugo Chávez could gain an iconic status among left-wing groups in Latin America that is comparable with that of Che Guevara,’ says Patricio Silva, Professor of Modern Latin American History. ‘Latin America as a whole is beginning a new chapter in its history.’

Historian Alanna O’Malley has been appointed to a brand-new Professorial Chair in United Nations Studies in Peace and Justice in The Hague. This extra attention for the UN comes at a significant moment in world history, she says.

Leiden University has six top bachelor's programmes according to Keuzigids universiteiten 2025, a consumer guide to university programmes. This puts Leiden in fourth place of the broad-based universities.

What do you do with a museum collection full of individual white Nobel laureates at a time when diversity, inclusion and teamwork reign supreme? Ad Maas, professor by special appointment, and researcher Hilbrand Wouters have been awarded an NWO Museum grant to answer that question.

Dutch influencers like Romy Boomsma and Nina Pierson have a huge following on Instagram and are increasingly sharing book tips there. Researcher Aafje de Roest wants to find out more about the reading culture they are promoting and its effect on the reading habits of their mostly young female follow…

How would you convert Egyptian hieroglyphs into Latin script? And what is actually the correct translation of dishes on a Vietnamese menu? On Saturday 28 January, high school students from all over the Netherlands will come to Leiden to ponder a series of language-related puzzles. Their goal? To win…

Dr Jenny Doetjes was appointed Professor of Semantics and Language Variation in February. During her professorship Dr. Doetjes wishes to focus on charting linguistic patterns between languages that, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other.

Kim Beerden, lecturer in Ancient History, has won the 2016 LUS Teaching Prize.

As of 1 September , Karel Berkhoff has been appointed professor by special appointment in Ukrainian History. In this position, made possible in part by the KNAW, he will focus primarily on dark moments in recent Ukrainian history: the persecutions that have taken place in the first half of the twentieth…

Mass, time, space, and complexity — physicists in Leiden are launching eight new research projects tackling some of the most fundamental themes in quantum mechanics. Their goal: to push the limits of current quantum theories.

What chemicals do plants have available, and what happens if they use them when faced with bacteria or fungi? That is what PhD candidate Luis Salomé Abarca is keen to learn. He studies plants’ survival and their use of chemical components in communication and defence. Salomé Abarca works at the Natural…

Professor Nira Wickramasinghe has won the American Historical Association John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History for her book Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka' (Columbia University Press: New York 2020).

Four students of the Faculty of Archaeology investigated how the current and past inhabitants of the Dutch province of South Holland deal with water. Their findings now feature in an exhibition that can now be visited in the Van Steenis building’s Reuvenshal.

‘Three books published within a year – that happens only once in a lifetime!’ This was the reaction of Katarzyna Cwiertka, Professor of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University, on the publication of Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War, one of her three new books. The book sketches the colonisation of…

Until last year the Archaeology Field Techniques programme for first-year students consisted of a number of two-hour lectures. Now they spend a whole day on the programme. Assistant professor Jasper de Bruin is enthusiastic about this new approach. ‘You can do a lot more with the students, and that…

Isabel van Vledder and Dieuwertje van der Vlugt, 2 astronomy students from Leiden University, have mapped the entire Milky Way galaxy in dwarf stars for the first time. This result is the most comprehensive model ever for the distribution of these stars. The findings appear in a new paper in Monthly…

Leiden University and the Beijing Institute of Technology will be collaborating in the area of computer science teaching and research. One of the first outcomes of this collaboration will be a joint four-year bachelor's programme. Willem te Beest, Vice-President of the Executive Board, and Professor…

Symposium on the extraordinary excavations at Middenbeemster

Lack of manliness, avaricious or too imaginative. These are just a few of the accusations with which British scientists discredited each other over a hundred years ago. PhD candidate Léjon Saarloos researched British scientists around the year 1900 and their idea of what makes a good - and therefore…

A team of scientists, including Leiden Astronomer Alice Booth, has discovered silicon monosulfide molecules in the dust disk around a young star. Such molecules indicate planet formation. The team made the discovery using the ALMA telescopes. This method provides an alternative when direct observation…

Childcare, no access to labs and extra time for online teaching. These are the main reasons why young researchers at Leiden University have seen a significant drop in their productive working hours since the beginning of lockdown. These are the results of a Young Academy Leiden survey of over 200 early-career…

The seventh Leiden wall formula has been finished. Over the last few weeks, mural artists Ben Walenkamp and Jan Willem Bruins have painted Christiaan Huygens' pendulum formula on 'De Brandmeester' an old drill and hose tower in de Plaatsteeg, just behind the Breestraat in Leiden.

Fascinating images, articles of clothing and other unique objects from the past four centuries of the history of Leiden University can now be seen in the ‘Celebrating Curiosity’ exhibition in the hall of Rapenburg 70.

Corinne Dettmeijer-Vermeulen, the well-known legal expert and Leiden University alumna, was for many years the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children. On 26 November she will deliver the Cleveringa lecture.

Pancras Hogendoorn bade farewell as Dean of Medicine and Vice-Chairman of the LUMC Board of Directors with a symposium at the LUMC.

The new book, ‘Njord in de Oorlog’ (Njord during the War), describes how the Leiden student rowing club was affected by the Second World War in a detailed series of personal stories. On Monday 16 November, Njord president Rosalie ten Wolde presented the first copy to Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker.

In January, Dr Karsten Lambers was appointed as Professor of Digital and Computational Archaeology at Leiden University's Faculty of Archaeology. With his extensive background in both archaeological research and computational sciences, the installation of Professor Lambers further strengthens this discipline…

As climate change and ecological degradation’s effects on our mental health becomes more severe, we must all do our best to protect not just the environment, but also our mental well-being. Therefore, on this Sustainability Day, we have collaborated with Healthy University Leiden to focus on the relationship…

NUFFIC’s Orange Knowledge programme, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, awarded a grant to the proposal of Jacqueline Vel, Adriaan Bedner and Leiden alumnus Fachrizal Afandi just before the Christmas holidays.

More and more people worldwide have infections caused by bacteria that are resistant to many types of antibiotic. Why is this and how big of a problem is it?

Biologist Laura Bertola argues that the traditional separation of lions into African and Asian subspecies is incorrect. She has discovered that Africa is actually home to two subspecies. Her PhD defense was on 18 March 2015.

Aqueous solutions of proteins and carbohydrates separate into two parts with an extremely ‘soft’ boundary surface. The surface tension between these two parts can be manipulated, for example by adjusting the pH balance. This can be used to develop emulsions of a water-based solution in another aqueous…

Statement from the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review regarding the UK Brexit referendum campaign:

Professor Annetje Ottow will be appointed President of the Executive Board of Leiden University on 8 February 2021. She will be the first woman to be appointed to this post at Leiden University.

A team of Leiden researchers has won the Ammodo Science Award for innovative humanities research on perceptions of cultural heritage.

Three young MI students have upheld Leiden's honour in the finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). PhD candidate Ludo Pulles and Master's student Reinier Schmiermann travelled to Russia and came 15th out of 117 teams. PhD candidate Pim Spelier participated in the online contest…

The Special Issue, edited by Jorrit Rijpma, Melanie Fink, Kristof Gombeer, and Anna Petrig, contains a selection of contributions from the Conference organised by the Europa Institute on the topic of the EU and Maritime Security in October 2018.

An international team of researchers led by Leiden archaeology professor Marie Soressi and Leipzig senior geneticist Matthias Meyer has recovered the DNA of a woman belonging to an Ancient North Eurasian population from a 20,000-year-old pendant. This is the first time DNA analysis has been used to…

Leiden scientists will be working on the development of a camera for the European Extremely Large Telescope that is currently under construction. On 28 September the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy signed an agreement with the European Southern Observatory.

A delegation from Leiden University will be visiting several Japanese universities and research institutions from 18 to 26 November to discuss research and teaching collaborations.

Academic research on terrorism is getting better all the time. This is the conclusion of university lecturer Bart Schuurman after studying 3,442 articles. He published his study in Terrorism and Political Violence.

Researchers from Leiden Law School and the LUMC have received a grant for a joint research project. They will be looking into ways in which caregivers and patients can work together to come to a better decision.

Last month (February 5-8 2024), the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, hosted a workshop entitled ‘Caribbean World Heritage Sites in the light of today’s global challenges: the case of Historic Bridgetown and Its Garrison’.

This year the PhDs of the institute had their traditional day out (uitje) to The Hague. The last two years they had stayed in Leiden, so The Hague already seemed like quite the adventure. Indeed, it seems almost that as time progresses and more and more archives become digitized, history PhDs slowly…

A chair tipping over serves as a metaphor for a migraine attack in Thijs Perenboom’s PhD research at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). He wants to unravel whether and how we can predict migraine attacks. He will defend his thesis on Tuesday 21 June.

The Hortus Botanicus is celebrating its 425-year anniversary this year. It’s the oldest botanical garden in the Netherlands, but how did it come into existence and what kind of research takes place there?