In the master’s specialisation Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology at Leiden University students are trained by experts in the areas of molecular biology, microbiology, plant genetics, cellular imaging, animal disease models, and various –omics technologies and the corresponding bioinformatics.

The Cardiovascular Pharmacology research group headed by Ilze Bot aims to elucidate the mechanisms that underlie atherosclerotic plaque destabilization, which is the key process that leads to acute cardiovascular syndromes such as a myocardial infarction or stroke.

Development of Comprehensive and High-throughput metabolomics techniques and Clinical applications of (pharmaco)metabolomics

Haunting the future through poetry

Daily management at the Institute of Biology Leiden is executed by the Scientific Director, the Director of Education, the Director of Operations and the Management Assistant. Research and education are managed collaboratively, with strategic input from various representatives and gremia, including…

On 18 April, Alexandre Tavadian defended the thesis 'The International Civil Service: Redefining Its Independence'. The doctoral research was supervised by Niels Blokker and Brian McGarry.

Leiden University focuses on four leadership competences. We believe that connecting with both yourself and others is essential for good teamwork, taking responsibility and pushing boundaries.

This project investigates the rich linguistic history of the crucial language groups in East Africa and includes a search for words that indicate earlier lost languages. These outcomes, combined with recent archaeological and genetic research, will contribute to a new understanding of East Africa’s…

Have you spotted the special voting bins on campus yet? Send us your suggestions for challenging, non-scientific questions and who knows? Your burning question might just be the next butt-kicker!

Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability showcases how the eco-geological creativity of the earth is integrally woven into the landforms, cultures, and cosmovisions of modern Himalayan communities.

On the 27th of February, Marta Morgado successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Marta on this achievement!

Study all aspects of human life in the past and take on a broad, historic perspective.

PhD student Doris van Bergeijk brought 40,000-year-old bacteria from mammoth poop back to life. She hopes to find new information that can help research at the Institute of Biology Leiden into antibiotics and antibiotics resistance. Read about it on European Antibiotic Awareness Day, 18 November.

Paul Behrens and his team have won the Frontiers Planet Prize of half a million euros for their research into the effects of switching to a plant-based diet.

The starting point of human-induced landscape changes has been under permanent debate. It is widely accepted that the emergence of agriculture strongly increased human impact on their environments. However, foragers can and do actively transform land cover and ecosystems. Ethnographic observations,…

Research on Asian plants is his life's work. Now a crown is added to that: a plant from the coffee family bearing his name. Paul Kessler is LUF professor of botanical gardens and botany of South East Asia and Scientific Director of the Hortus botanicus. 'Completely unexpectedly, you get to see the results…

The New Scientist magazine has selected two young Leiden scientists for its Top 25 Young Talents in the Netherlands and Flanders: historian Karwan Fatah-Black and neuropsychologist Mariska Kret. Who will be the winner? You can vote for one of them!

Janna Marie Bas-Hoogendam, Stefanie Meeuwis, and Eliška Procházková have all been awarded a share of the Aspasia diversity grant obtained by Mariska Kret. These three promising young psychologists will each receive 10,000 euros as a stepping stone towards a career in science. This gives them three months…

One discovered that arteriosclerosis resembles an autoimmune disease, while the other developed a system to aid in the search for new medications. For these achievements, Marie Depuydt and Jurren de Groot were awarded the Krijn Rietveld Memorial Innovation Award on the evening of Tuesday 4 June.

PhD defence

On the past 6th of October, the Pillar A of the research program me Citizenship, Migration and Global Transformations finally had its awaited kick-off event, which was previously cancelled last spring due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The main interest of this research concerns the beliefs and perceptions of Chinese and Dutch university teachers regarding the role of research in university teaching, and how these beliefs and perceptions can be explained by their cultural, institutional and individual background characteristics.

How do academics develop into novel researcher roles alongside current teacher roles in the context of new universities in transition?

In September 2023 Social Justice Research, a journal from Springer Nature, published a ‘Special Issue on Veteran Reflections’. Eight ‘veterans’ analysed the current status of justice research and suggested new directions and refinements. Herman Steensma, guest member of the section Social, Economic…

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) implies that societal actors (researchers, citizens, policy makers, business, third sector organisations, etc.) work together during the whole research and innovation process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and…

In the research master Politics, Culture and National Identities, 1789 to the Present at Leiden University you will be at the forefront of a new approach to understand how politics and identities in Europe are conceived.

This research tries to create a coherent comprehension of misfit, enhance conceptual knowledge, highlight prevalent knowledge.

Coral reefs throughout the world are under threat. After studying the reefs in Malaysia, Zarinah Waheed concluded that there is room for improvement in coral reef conservation. PhD defence 22 November.

How do people experience ‘inclusion’ in sports? How can experiential expertise enhance policies in sport and inclusion? This research internship at The Mulier Institute enables a student to investigate these issues from a qualitative research perspective.

The RISIS project aims at creating a distributed research infrastructure to support and advance science and innovation studies. This will give the field a strong scientific push forward, and at the same time, provide a radically improved evidence base for research and innovation policies, for research…

This thesis investigated the extent to which participation of school students in decision-making processes can be achieved, including through participatory action research (PAR) in teacher education.

Language evolution, targeted drugs or archaeological interpretation. Researchers are making increasing use of supercomputers that can rapidly process large quantities of data. This is one reason why the University data centre will be extended and updated. ‘Datamining means we can get a better picture…

People from the Dutch islands of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius say that violence (mainly verbal) is fairly common in families. This is according to research by Leiden University, the University of Curaçao and UNICEF Netherlands. The researchers make recommendations for preventing such violence over…

AI4Europe is one of the projects, funded under the Horizon Europe programme, that is responsible for the management, development and facilitation of the AI-on-Demand Platform (AIoD).

Who are open-source intelligence activists and how reliable are their contributions to public understanding of Russia’s war in Ukraine?

This is a research project on the implementation of national mathematics curriculum reform in Chinese junior high school. The research is expected to provide insight into the ways and reasons of mathematics teachers in Chinese junior high school for implementing national curriculum reform.

The new book by Dimiter Toshkov - associate professor of Public Administration at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs - has been recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Classical statistical methods, such as p-values, are difficult for researchers to apply correctly. They for example do not allow drawing conclusions from a study early, or for extending a study with extra research groups that want to make their data available later.

SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM: Locating Responsibility for Forced Expatriate Labour Practices by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)

Health workers have always sought ways to fight disease in vulnerable groups in the population. It is now clear that such research also benefits more prosperous countries. African worm infections and innovative thermometers have shown Leiden researchers how to fight diseases of affluence and keep health…

Taking part in TikTok challenges, online gambling, and forwarding nudes. ‘Why do adolescents take online risks?’, psychologist Neeltje Blankenstein wonders. Her research on online risk taking has been awarded a Veni grant by the Netherlands Research Council (NWO). Read her answers to five questions.

Five projects with researchers from Leiden University have received a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to build or upgrade existing research facilities.

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

Can humans sense where north is, using what is known as magnetoreception? This question had master’s student Björn Keyser (Media Technology) so intrigued that he started crowdfunding to be able to study this together with the California Institute of Technology.

The project will support Responsible, Research and Innovation (RRI) policy experiments in the healthcare sector in three European territories: in Murcia (ES), Örebro (SE) and the Republic of Cyprus (CY). CHERRIES will engage the territorial stakeholder ecosystems in participatory agenda setting, need…

The main aim of the project is to collect and update on a regular basis bibliometric and patent indicators that can be used to underpin and inform analyses pursued at the European Commission (EC) to assess European and national scientific and technological performance.