The two-year Media Technology MSc programme (120 EC) (as of September 2025: Creative Intelligence & Technology) includes mandatory core courses, accent courses, electives, a field trip, a public exhibition, as well as a personal Graduation Research Project.

This thesis studies the geometry of representation varieties and character stacks. These are spaces parametrizing the representations of a finitely generated group, typically the fundamental group of a compact manifold, into an algebraic group G.

This political theory specialisation focuses on the concepts of legitimacy and justice—political philosophy’s core themes. Immersing yourself in theories, philosophical and theoretical methods, and complex cases, you will make the leap from opinion to analysis.

The master's programme in Philosophy at Leiden University integrates historical and systematic approaches in philosophy. It offers an advanced training in philosophical methodologies and skills, as well as a sophisticated knowledge of traditional and recent philosophical developments. At Leiden University,…

The master's programme in Philosophy at Leiden University integrates historical and systematic approaches in philosophy. It offers an advanced training in philosophical methodologies and skills, as well as a sophisticated knowledge of traditional and recent philosophical developments. At Leiden University,…

Accurately recognising others’ emotions is a fundamental social skill, relevant for navigating the social world from early childhood. Children’s ability to do represents a milestone in their socioemotional development and is associated with a number of important psychosocial outcomes. Many individual…

The Physics master’s programme offers you a research intensive and tailor-made study path on current topics in experimental and theoretical physics at an institute of international renown. We offer five research specialisations, with emphasis on either experimental or theoretical physics, which train…

The Physics master’s programme offers you a research intensive and tailor-made study path on current topics in experimental and theoretical physics at an institute of international renown. We offer five research specialisations, with emphasis on either experimental or theoretical physics, which train…

The specialisation enables you to understand the fundamentals of management and entrepreneurship alongside high quality mathematical research.

Wout Broekema is shortlisted for the Els Witte Prize 2019, an award for best Doctoral dissertation in political science. The prize is instated by the Nederlandse Kring voor de wetenschap der Politiek (NKWP).

This event is in Dutch. De Verenigde Naties hebben 11 februari uitgeroepen tot International Day of Women & Girls in Science. De Universiteit Leiden viert deze dag met een open publieksevenement met vrouwelijke topwetenschappers van haar bètafaculteit. Iedereen is welkom vanaf 13:30 uur in het Kamerlingh…

Time and again synthesised substances have been shown to pollute the environment more than lab tests predicted. In her inaugural lecture on 16 November, professor of Ecotoxicology Martina Vijver gives a warning for the risks of new, man-made chemical substances and nanomaterials. Various media payed…

From 1 to 2 June 2017 Leiden University hosts the annual 24-hour Political Science Conference (‘Politicologenetmaal’). This event will bring together political scientists and practitioners from Flanders and The Netherlands, who will participate in several workshops to discuss subjects like elections,…

Lecture

Bringing together chemists and physicists to thoroughly investigate how electrochemical processes work on the smallest scale. That is the goal of the new Advanced Nano-electrochemistry Institute of the Netherlands, or ANION for short. The consortium receives a Gravitation funding of 23.6 million euros…

In a lawsuit concerning the upcoming Dutch elections, the Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals) is claiming that everyone should be able to cast a postal vote. Is it a form of discrimination that everyone above the age of 70 is allowed to cast their vote by post, but people who are younger and…

Leiden physicists use a new method to measure so-called surface plasmons. Researching these particles could lead to new light-based technology, including faster internet.

In 2023, many of our students and staff won great prizes and secured important research grants.

Below you will find an overview of all PRE-Classes provided by the various programmes of Leiden University. For each section, you can find a description of the content and more specific information about the requirements for participation in the Class.

For most of the past ten years, Europe has been in a state of ‘crisis’. The bank crisis mutated seamlessly via the Euro crisis to the present migrant crisis. Whereas previously the general assumption was that even closer cooperation within the European Union was a foregone conclusion, the EU is now…

While bioinformatics methods deal with the analysis of sequence information (be it proteins or DNA), the field of cheminformatics is concerned with the analysis of small-molecule datasets.

Our education programmes span the entire spectrum of Animal Sciences, Evolution, Biodiversity and Conservation, Microbial Biotechnology and Plant Sciences.

Media Technology: a master’s program for you?

C.R. Hermans (2012). Facsimile-editie van Noordbrabants Oudheden aangevuld met enkele Archeologische Mengelwerken.

Atoms and molecules are the basic units of matter. If we keep dividing a bar of gold or a glass of water into smaller parts, at the end we are left with a single gold atom or a water molecule.

Effective host defence against tuberculosis bacteria depends on a properly balanced level of inflammation. The Inflammafish project uses zebrafish larvae to study how autophagy controls this inflammation and vice versa.

On Thursday 20 May 2021, Tania Li delivered the annual Van Vollenhoven Lecture.

A network combining 9 academic research groups and 4 collaborating industrial companies will train the next generation of PhD students and post-doctoral researchers, in developing and applying novel experimental and theoretical methods in the NMR spectroscopy of systems containing paramagnetic metals.…

LCA has become an important method to study environmental impacts of human activities. Still, there are several methodological issues in LCA that can adversely affect the results reliability.

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding teaching in the disciplines of cultural anthropology, education and child studies, political science, psychology, science and technology studies, as well as in multidisciplinary approaches.

Play and Media is one of the six research themes of the LUCAS Modern and Contemporary cluster.

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Can we use indigenous microbial rice communities to reduce methane production in agricultural settings?

If a new method has been developed to recognize and treat a (neuro-)psychological disorder or related behavioral factors, it cannot yet be used directly in clinical practice. First, the method should be evaluated, preferably in randomized controlled trials.

On 19 September 2019, Lynette Janssen defended her thesis 'EU Bank Resolution Framework: A comparative study on the relation with national private law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof.mr. W.A.K. Rank and prof. M. Haentjens.

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.J. Kroes

Hoye proposes that concerns about virtues of the sovereign are essential for understanding Hobbes's both his political thinking and his political critique.

This study documents and translates the Saa (Zapotec) cultural heritage of the Bene’ Ya’a/En’ne I’ya peoples, the Zapotec inhabitants of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca.

On the 13th of October, Cesko Voeten successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Cesko on this achievement!

Promotores: H.W. Lenstra, K. Belabas (University of Bordeaux)

Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam

On Tuesday 23 May 2017, Jasmina Mackic defended her doctoral thesis ‘Proving discriminatory violence at the European Court of Human Rights’. The supervisor of the research is Vice Dean and Professor of Public International Law Larissa van den Herik. A brief summary of her thesis is provided below.

Leiden University and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management are involved in a collaboration in the form of a research project titled 'Data-Driven Risk Assessment in Infrastructure Networks'.

Our everyday life consists of all sorts of spatial processes: we find our way to work, remember where we left our keys, and are able to pick up our cup of coffee. We study how the human brain processes such spatial processes. From a clinical perspective, we are interested in how acquired brain damage…

On the 26th of January, Alex Reuneker successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Alex on this achievement!

The Darién region of Panama is the only land bridge connecting North, Central and South America. Nowadays home to descendants of African enslaved peoples, Indigenous peoples (Emberá, Wounaan, and Guna), and mestizos, Darién has been and still is fundamental to connectivity, cultural interchange, and…

States, we are told, have monopolized the legal right to wage war since the seventeenth century and this arrangement has provided some basic stability in international relations. But is this really true? This project challenges this classic account and opens the way for rethinking the contemporary laws…

PURPOSE: The aim of the study was to develop a cheap and fast method to produce hollow microneedles and an applicator for injecting vaccines into the skin at a pre-defined depth and test the applicability of the system for dermal polio vaccination.

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

This research programme aims to increase the scientific understanding of how current and emerging anthropogenic threats affect biodiversity and ecosystem services to facilitate strategic management of natural resources. To this end, we address urgent challenges in relation to the mechanisms involved…