It is one of the most personal and simultaneously most universal experiences of human life: caring for a young child. Professor Sarah Cramsey has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate how factors such as nationality, political systems, and religion influence the first thousand days after…

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…

Russian military concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries still exist and have not lost their strategic relevance. The Russians used them to annex Crimea and are now applying them in the war in Ukraine. Although the concepts have been around for a long time, it does not mean they…

GIFs, memes and videos: anyone who opens a social media platform can be in no doubt that today we live in a visual culture. But the role of images in social communications isn’t new, says Associate Professor Marika Keblusek. She has been awarded a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Open Competition (Large)…

PhD defence

Facility

Environmental scientist Rutger Hoekstra addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on 12 April. And that’s quite a big thing to do. How do you get there as a scientist? And, more importantly, what was his message? In eight questions, Rutger explains what he does and why.

PhD defence

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.

Na Zhou (PhD at ICLON) researched how vocational teachers’ learning takes place in a work placement programme and how their learning supports their teaching in school. Defence on 1 March.

The 2015 and 2018 Personnel monitors show that maintaining a good work balance remains difficult for staff at the Faculty of Humanities. Lecturer and researcher Judith Naeff and holder of the operational management portfolio Suzy Sirks have joined the Work Balance Steering Committee to examine the…

Human resources

Conference, Summer School

Organisation

Facility

The Dutch Government would like to allow QR checks at work. Legal experts expect that employees who refuse could be dismissed.

Lecture, INVISIHIST Masterclass

Alumnus Rennie Roos lives and works in Indonesia. What took him there, what does he do there and what inspires him?

Gert Oostindie, Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial History, has been made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau. He was awarded the royal honour by Leiden mayor Henri Lenferink after giving his valedictory lecture, ‘The future of the colonial past’, in the Academy Building of Leiden University…

Arts and culture

Despite the promising effects of technology in assessment and treatment, the actual use of novel technologies in juvenile justice context remains limited. We want to inspire researchers to develop and investigate technological applications for assessment and treatment for justice involved youth.

Conference

Human resources

An escape room gave staff the chance to test their knowledge about cybersecurity at work. Would they manage to defuse the bomb in time without falling for the phishing emails or causing a data breach?

Our university recently joined the European university alliance Una Europa. Staff from the 11 affiliated universities met in Leiden last week to discuss our collaboration.

Leiden University joins the Just Transitions for AMR Working Group, an interdisciplinary team of social science and humanities researchers who are exploring ways to mitigate the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance in a just and equitable manner, with due consideration to the human rights of present…

As coordinator and lead promoter respectively of the Leiden Healthy Society Center, psychologists Sandra van Dijk and Anke Klein use interdisciplinary collaboration to resolve the major health problems of the present day. How are they going to do that in the coming period?

Dr. Brackney is a modern European intellectual and cultural historian with a Ph.D. from Yale University. Before coming to Leiden, she held postdoctoral teaching posts in the History & Literature program at Harvard University and the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago.

Education

Security

Alumni event, Lunch webinar

If you want to stay fit, you have to go to the gym regularly, and – hopefully - cleaning our teeth is something we do at least twice a day. So, why shouldn’t we keep on working on a safe and healthy work climate, HR Director Esther van Opstal asks in a conversation on where things stand now with the…

‘We want to say something very different from the norm. We are the radicals now.’ Tahir Abbas is lyric about the DRIVE project he will be leading from Leiden University in The Hague. This is a short introduction to the research that will be carried out in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the United…

Historians recently started preliminary research on Leiden University’s role in colonialism and historical slavery. Our knowledge about this is too limited and fragmented. They are looking with fresh eyes at Leiden’s archives and collections. An interview with historians Alicia Schrikker and Ligia G…

CADS lecturer Sander Hölsgens is one of the initiators of the NWO Smart Culture Project Documenting Complexity (project number CISC.KC.212). This project investigates how and why engaged documentary filmmakers use new technologies in their work. One of the outputs of this project is the series ‘In Whose…

Organisation

ICT

Connecting scientific fields, enhancing research and teaching, and providing innovative solutions to complex social issues: that is the idea behind interdisciplinary research. What did the university achieve in 2024? A small sample.

For a successful return to society, incarcerated individuals must work on their reentry during their sentence. Not all such individuals receive good reentry support. This is according to a report by Leiden criminologists.

While studying Indonesian languages and cultures, Rennie Roos started a company. Today he has been working in Indonesia for more than eight years. Where does his love for this country come from? And how does he look back on his studies? ‘I actually wanted to become a pilot.’

This month's flash interview is with alumna Sytske Besemer, Criminologist, who works at a startup called Cradle. Sytske has specifically chosen to work for a company with societal impact. And she is about to move again, this time to Zürich.

Education, Facility

Education

Geert-Jan Janse has always been fascinated by the way objects can bring the past closer. On 16 November, he will present a Museum Talk about his work as the director of the Vereniging Rembrandt (Rembrandt Association).

Excessive regulatory burden causes economic harm and can undermine trust in government. Policymakers wishing to ease this should be more mindful of people’s differing responses to rules, says PhD candidate Ritsart Plantenga in his dissertation.

Starting with the ‘why’, putting herself in her students’ shoes and providing structure. These are three ways in which environmental scientist Ranran Wang tries to make her course as interesting and manageable as possible. With success: she has been nominated for Science Teacher of the Year 2022.

The question of land property titles is a common source of conflict between indigenous communities and federal authorities all over the Americas. A new Panamanian law have led indigenous communities to reach out to archaeologist Dr Natalia Donner. A grant from the Centre for Indigenous American Studies…