The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences provides its ca. 5000 students with a thorough education in the social and behavioural sciences. The student population is very diverse and international in nature.

This book contains the first three Leiden-Aramco Lectures on Arabic Language and Culture delivered by Petra Sijpesteijn, James E. Montgomery and Geert Jan van Gelder.

On 20 September 2019, the opening drinks for the Open Science Community Leiden will be held at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Open science is the approach to science aimed at making scientific research accessible, reproducible, and freely available to people within and outside the academic…

An international team of scientists, including Xander Tielens of Leiden Observatory, has used space telescope Hubble and the ALMA observatory to show that UV radiation from massive stars can prevent planets from forming. The researchers publish their findings on 1 March in the journal Science.

PhD defence

The Old Obervatory Leiden is one of the partners of the local learning ecosystem ‘Verwonder om de Hoek’, an educational platform from Leiden that lets school children and families wonder about the world of Nature, Science, Technology and Sustainability. On this page you will find the educational programmes…

In this thesis we push the boundaries of high-resolution imaging at radio frequencies between 100 and 200 MHz. Using the International LOFAR Telescope that spans across Europe we achieve sub-arcsecond angular resolution.

Are there other planets like the earth, and will there also be life? Astronomers study planets around stars other than the sun, with the aim to find out what kind of gasses their atmospheres are made up with.

On this section of the website you can find more information about the Old Observatory and the current astronomy research institute.

Promotor: M. de Jong, Co-Promotor: Samtleben

The Old Observatory of Leiden is the oldest existing university observatory in the world. While students from Leiden University attend lectures in the main part, the visitor center in the basement and the telescopes on the building serve the general public. On this website, you will find information…

The demolition of the high-rise building is ready. The remaining debris are removed and the area is cleared. For the demolition, the University applied the BREEAM evaluation method at the level of ‘Excellent’, which means that the demolition operations were carbon neutral and did not cause any form…

There are around 300,000 people in the Netherlands who donate blood on a regular basis. Women can give blood up to three times a year and men up to five times, resulting in approximately one million blood donations each year. Patients that receive this donated blood are already in a vulnerable condition,…

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…

In 2015, Jorryt Matthee thought he discovered an extremely distant galaxy called CR7, which lacked elements heavier than helium. Three years later, he shows with measurements using the ALMA telescope that the galaxy does have carbon after all, and even in normal concentrations. The American Astronomical…

Promotor: M.T.M. Koper, Co-promotors: A.I. Yanson, L.B.F. Juurlink

With each discovery that is made, the universe reveals a fraction of its secrets: the most distant galaxies and quasars, the atmosphere of exoplanets, evidence of dark matter, complex molecules in space. This is what fills the days and nights of the researchers from the Leiden Observatory and their…

Pope Francis has appointed astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. She joins an illustrious list of Nobel Prize winners, such as Ernest Rutherford, Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger. What is her view on this? An interview with our professor of Molecular astrop…

Every month there is an opportunity to visit the Old Observatory in the evening. These open evenings consist of a lecture followed by a visit to the telescopes in the building.

The local ordering of atoms at the surface of a metallic particle determines its catalytic activity and selectivity. As energy systems of the future will be based on efficient catalytic conversion of small molecules in closed cycles, we study how structural effects of catalysts can be used to our ad…

How does astronomy benefit you? The new single-episode podcast Cosmic Perspectives explores the impact of Dutch astronomy on society: from building positive international relationships to the transfer of life-changing technology.

Is there extra-terrestrial life out there? It now looks as though we can sketch out an answer to this enduring question. Leiden Observatory is helping to build new instruments to find the most promising exoplanets.

In this article, James Shires and Tatiana Tropina, assistant professors at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, map the relationship between gender equality and cybersecurity governance as a component of good security sector governance (SSG). Here, it highlights the way in which cybersecurity…

Molecular Physiology is a research group at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry dedicated to the design, synthesis and application of chemical tools to study important biological and biomedical questions. The group is headed by Prof. Dr. Mario van der Stelt and includes the research lines of Assistant…

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding mono- and multidisciplinary teaching.

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding teaching.

In comparing a selection of 18th-century histories to a representative sample of 19th-century histories of science, this project inquires: Which early modern vices persisted into the 19th century and to what extent were those vices embodied in anecdotes, conveyed through commonplaces, or symbolically…

Nature and History, Towards a Hermeneutic Philospohy of Historiography of Science

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding mono- and multidisciplinary teaching.

SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, is holding an open day on Sunday 25 September. It has had a branch at the Leiden Bio Science Park since 2021 and works closely with Leiden University.

Wrenching poverty, global inequality, violent political and ethnic strife, deadlocked, unresponsive or even collapsing governments, growing dissatisfaction with democracy and missed opportunities for innovation – these are merely some of the challenges of governance and development with which our programme…

The master's specialisation Astronomy and Instrumentation at Leiden University focuses on fully understanding the physical principles and performance of astronomical instruments and to contribute to the development of new instrumentation technologies.

James Shires has contributed a chapter to the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2021), which gathers 20 articles from the law, technology and strategy domains.

This new article by Bassant Hassib and James Shires is part of a special issue for Journal of Cybersecurity, based on a selection of contributions from THe Hague Program for Cyber Norms' 2019 Conference.

On 21 March 2019, James Welch defended his thesis 'The Grotius Sanction: Deus Ex Machina. The legal, ethical, and strategic use of drones in transnational armed conflict and counterterrorism'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. P.B Cliteur.

National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members. Angelo Romano, Matthias Sutter, James Liu, Toshio Yamagishi & Daniel Balliet studied national parochialism across different nations and conclude in their publication in Nature Communications that it is a ubiquitous…

Three major cosmology-focused missions are planned for the next decade: the Euclid space telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The formation and evolution of galaxies is fundamentally driven by the formation of new stars out of cold gas.