We are happy to announce that GARDEN VI will be held February 23rd, 2019 at the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo (DAIK). The conference is jointly organised by the DAIK, the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo and the American University Cairo!

Door de geopolitieke spanningen wereldwijd waaronder de oorlog in Oekraïne, wil Defensie overal in het land fors uitbreiden. Dit zal o.a. gevolgen hebben voor de opvanglokaties waar asielzoekers verblijven, maar ook voor burgers waarvan de woningen voor de plannen moet wijken.

‘It was the biggest bunch of flowers I’d ever seen,’ says Emily Strange about the moment she won the Leiden Teaching Prize 2022. The judge praised the conservation biologist for her passion, engaging personality, and the way she motivates her students. On the Dutch Day of the Teacher, we get to know…

How do you count the nanoplastics in your body? Leiden researchers published a method in Nature Protocols today that should make this easier. Important for both environmental and medicine research.

SAILS aims to forge links between the different disciplines at the University and to initiate new academic partnerships.

Four students of the MSc Industrial Ecology have recently been selected to participate in the accelerator programme of the EIT Climate-KIC, which helps sustainable start-ups. The four students use coconut husks to develop sustainable boards, which can be used to make furniture.

Museum De Lakenhal issued an open call for creative solutions to the problem of growth addiction. From over 500 submissions, they selected 15 artworks for the exhibition 'If things grow wrong'. These include the creations of Leiden researchers Peter van der Putten and Evert Jan van Leeuwen.

The universities of Delft, Leiden and Rotterdam are working together to show their students what artificial intelligence (AI) means for their own field. Three AI minors will start in the 2022 – 2023 academic year and will answer questions such as: ‘How best can you use AI in your research discipline?’…

With the start of the new academic year, the Social Resilience & Security programme proudly presents their yearbook. In the yearbook, you read about the programme’s interdisciplinary research building bridges between institutes, its educational activities such as the new Minor ‘Violence Studies’ and…

The better teaching is for pupils and students, the more solid the basis will be that we give them for their future careers. This type of teaching requires strong instructors and insight into the best ways in which pupils can be supported, and research at Leiden University is making a contribution in…

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

Five talks will be given during the Leiden Science Family Day: two children's lectures and three lectures for adults. Will you be there ?

Set up in 1991, this unique project aims to identify and describe the common lexical heritage of the most important Indo-European languages and language branches. The project has thus far resulted in twelve volumes published as The Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series (Brill, Leiden).

Met een openingswoord, een paneldiscussie op de Spaanse Trappen in Wijnhaven en een druk op de rode knop voor het gebouw zelf, is POPcorner The Hague donderdagmiddag officieel geopend door rector magnificus Hester Bijl.

‘To be honest, I don’t really care about what type of research is going on. Just let me do my own thing and everything is fine,’ according to biotechnical officer Davy de Witt. In this interview, he tells about his tasks and experiences at the Institute of Biology Leiden, where he has been employed…

Three Humanities lecturers received the Senior Qualification in Education (SKO) this year. University lecturer Bruno Verbeek is one of them. What does he think makes for good education?

Students greatly benefit from an interdisciplinary learning environment that makes connections with various stakeholders and tackles real-world challenges. This environment allows them to produce innovative and impactful results. As part of their studies, students from the International Institute of…

Leiden University has an active open science community. Open science means transparency in all phases of research by precisely documenting every step of the way and making this publicly available. ‘It’s time to be open,’ say psychologists Anna van ’t Veer and Zsuzsika Sjoerds. There is increasing awareness…

In order to build wind turbines and electric cars, we need tons of magnets. Currently, we import these mainly from China, which means Europe is very dependent on this superpower for the energy transition. This has to change, according to industrial ecologist René Kleijn. In the REEsilience project,…

Halima Bouras leaves for the City University of New York with her Fulbright scholarship. 'I am very happy with the Fulbright grant and excited to continue my research project in New York next semester', reacts Bouras. The aim of her PhD research is to promote educational opportunities and educational…

On the 9th of June Bahaddin Budak successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Leiden physicists are helping Wageningen plant researchers to study unpredictable plant embryos. For this, they are using a novel two-photon fluorescence microscope, aided by a 30 thousand euro ZonMW grant.

Friday October 24th Honours students had to present their case studies on a topical issue related to Humanities. All Honours students made posters in pairs of two and had to defend their case in front of an audience at the Old Observatory. It was a tense experience, since they were being graded by…

Master’s students in Industrial Ecology and Governance of Sustainability have helped answer organisations’ questions about sustainability

A discovery made in Leiden helps not only to make natural gas from CO2 but also to store renewable energy. Research by Professor Marc Koper and PhD student Jing Shen shows how this process can be implemented in a cost-effective and controllable way. Nature Communications, 2 september 2015.

From a new generation of antibiotics and more-effective vaccines to a map of dark matter and new light on Hindu traditions. Four researchers from Leiden University have received a prestigious €2.5m ERC Advanced Grant to develop their research.

Studying surfaces of solid materials: it may not seem relevant to energy consumption, but it is. Marcel Rost studies how platinum electrodes wear out. Those electrodes are a crucial component in the fuel cells of hydrogen-powered cars. ‘We need to make the switch from fossil fuel energy to hydrogen.…

The effects of sustainability projects on poorer, marginalised people should be considered at a much earlier stage. This is the opinion of Marja Spierenburg, Professor of Anthropology of Sustainable Development and Livelihood, who will give her inaugural lecture on 25 February.

Thanks to fanatical lobbying various groups of citizens and traders had a lot of influence on the initial success of the Dutch colony in Brazil. This is the conclusion of Leiden PhD candidate Joris van den Tol, who defended his thesis on 20 March.

They are often referred to as ‘The Oscars of the Natural Sciences’: the Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. This year, the prize for physics went to the Event Horizon Telescope team, which took the first-ever picture of a black hole. Four Leiden astronomers were…

Professor Jasper Knoester has been appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University. He will take up the role on 1 January 2022. Knoester is currently Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering at the University of Groningen. He succeeds Paul Wouters (Dean of the Faculty of Social and…

Without electronics carrying out computational tasks our daily lives would look very different. Devices such as elevators, vending machines, turnstiles, washing machines and even traffic lights use a simple form of electronic computing to switch from state to state. But, what if power supply is not…

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic SIP 2021 will be held online.

How can we organise society so as to keep our planet habitable for us and for all other life forms around us? To answer this question, Leiden researchers collaborate across disciplines, from biology to data science, and from environmental economy to archaeology.

We increasingly look at international consortia to come up with scientific and technological advances that are needed to address global challenges in areas such as health, the environment and clean energy. However, organising these consortia involves unique challenges. To identify these challenges,…

What opportunities does uncertainty offer with regard to innovative behaviour of professionals and what role does leadership play in this?

The project’s main aim was to build a reconstruction of a prehistoric house plan, without using any metal tools. How effective are tools made of stone, flint, bone, antler and wood? What are the constraints imposed by the various building materials? How much labour do we need and how much knowledge…

The standard approach to build a quantum computer with Majoranas as building blocks is to convert them into qubits. However, a promising application of quantum computing—quantum chemistry—would require these qubits to be converted again into so-called fermions. Physicists from Leiden and Delft suggest…

The idea that socially anxious people avoid eye contact because they are not interested in other people needs to be changed. They take their information from other physical sources, such as people's hands. This is the finding of Leiden psychologist Mariska Kret whose research has been published in…

BA 3 student Dasha Derzhavets is one of the first students to be back in the lab at the Faculty of Archaeology. She is conducting experiments in the ceramic and experimental lab for her thesis. ‘It is different in the labs, a lot quieter, I can better concentrate on my work however.’

The European Union acts as one of the most powerful economic actors in the global economy, presents itself as the most successful integration project in recent history, and deploys one of the largest diplomatic services in the world. The European Union Studies minor offers a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary…

Every day we make use of devices, services and apps which contain algorithms that could be discriminating. These range from Facebook to self-driving cars, from the Tax Authorities to a rotating door.

'Make sure you separate yourself from your work.' And, 'Your dissertation doesn't have to be a magnum opus.' It was raining tips for PhD students at the humanities PhD event on well-being on Tuesday, 5 September.

How do you turn your thesis into an academic article? That's a question Floortje Fontein, who conducted research into inclusive leadership, can answer. She looked at how public managers manage a diverse team. She got a 9 for her thesis and is currently working on several articles based on the results…

This book brings together contributions on topics related to the Dutch EU Presidency Agenda 2016 from a number of scholars who are affiliated with Leiden University.

To increase the accuracy of climate models, it is crucial that they include past human land-use and human-driven vegetation changes. Here archaeology can make an important contribution. Current models are based on reconstructions of past vegetation. However, their accuracy is limited because it does…

A punishment that fits the crime is the cornerstone of the rechtsstaat or constitutional state. But opinions differ greatly on what constitutes a just and effective punishment. Research by Leiden University provides politicians, legislators, law enforcers and the public with new information and insights…