The publication of the recent IPCC report on climate change has not gone unnoticed, to put it mildly, certainly not within the Liveable Planet community.

Through an NWO grant, chemist Rik Mom has received a tenure track position at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, where he obtained his PhD cum laude in 2017. Mom will study the storage of sustainable energy by means of splitting water. Using new methods, he will investigate on an atomic scale which…

Researchers at Leiden University have been awarded a €4 million EU grant to develop climate-neutral fuels. With this money they will expand the broad research community that focuses on green energy. If we work together, we can make the rapid progress that is needed, says Prof. Huub de Groot, Professor…

The energy transition ranks high on the European policy agenda, but what does it take to get there? René Kleijn researches how we can extract, use and reuse raw materials in a responsible way. Since 1 March, he has been appointed professor of Resilient resource supply.

Mining for natural resources harms the environment. But we desperately need them, for both the development of countries and the transition to a sustainable energy system. Professor of Sustainable Resource Use Ester van der Voet researches how we can reduce the environmental impact of natural resources…

CERN has approved the construction and operation of SND@LHC, a neutrino detector at the Large Hadron Collider. It's a precursor for SHiP, a detector meant to detect dark matter. Leiden physicist Alexey Boyarsky is one of the initiators of both SHiP and SND@LHC.

Eco-innovations like more economical cars do not generate the environmental benefits predicted by the manufacturers. This is the result of the so-called rebound effect, concludes Leiden industrial ecologist David Font Vivanco on the basis of new algorithms. PhD defence 3 March.

The KM3NeT neutrino detector celebrates the installation of the first string of detectors in the Mediterranean Sea off the French coast. It will measure neutrinos’ spooky spontaneous change in flavor. Leiden physicist Dorothea Samtleben is closely involved in the project.

In 2018 the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) was launched in the UK. The aim of this programme was to help laboratories work more sustainably and efficiently. The initiative got a Dutch spin-off in 2021. Since then, a couple of the laboratories at the Leiden Faculty of Science have…

Marc Koper, Professor of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry, has been elected as President Elect of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE). He will be President Elect for two years starting January 2019, followed by two years as President and two years as Immediate Past President.

Over the past few months, Urban Studies students have been helping to think about the realisation of the Humanities Campus. To test their knowledge in practice, the future urban specialists gave advice on several different aspects, including thermal energy storage and the new central campus building…

During the Bachelor Honours Class ‘The world is quantum’, students from various disciplines learned about the rules of nature on the smallest scale: quantum mechanics. What opportunities and dangers do they see for their field of study?

A collaboration of physicists and chemists organized the LEELIS conference on new computer chip technology in Amsterdam on 10-11 November. Leiden physicist Joost Frenken is director of the organizing institute ARCNL.

Leiden chemists have created a new ultrathin membrane only one molecule thick. The membrane can produce a hundred times more power from seawater than the best membranes used today. The researchers have published their findings in Nature Nanotechnology.

We asked a lot of everyone last year. The Personnel Monitor showed that the workload was high in 2022 and Covid took its toll. I therefore think everyone deserves some downtime. Time away from the daily grind.

Electrons that spin synchronously around their axis, turn out to stay superconducting across large distances within magnetic chromium dioxide. Electric current from these electrons can flip small magnets, and its superconducting version could form the basis for a hard drive without energy loss. Publication…

Biophysicist Anjali Pandit has been awarded a FOM 'Projectruimte' research grant for her proposal ‘Tuning into the photosynthetic membrane with atomistic precision’.

In the new Annual Report 2022 we report on not only research and teaching at Leiden University but also ICT, real estate, personnel, finance, impact and knowledge transfer and more.

A catalyst: normally a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction, without adding molecules to this reaction. Scientists from the group of Prof. Marc Koper of Leiden University and Prof. Yang Shao-Horn of MIT now discovered that in specific reactions that need oxygen, catalysts called metal oxides…

Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency to date but it is starting to have some serious physical effects on the environment. A study shows that in an optimistic case the growth of demand on electricity is little, but in the pessimistic case this may lead to a total electricity demand similar to…

Eurostat, the European statistical office, reports that inflation in the Eurozone has increased to 4.1 per cent. What are the implications for your wallet and your savings? And how can consumers respond?

Solving a scientific problem after decades: it’s a long-lasting dream for many scientists. Consequently, the research of Leiden and Eindhoven chemists gained a lot of media attention, for instance from the Belgian news website VRT Nieuws and science website Phys.org.

Leiden students organised a Model United Nations (MUN) from 3 to 6 May in The Hague. An MUN simulates the working of the United Nations and is intended to allow students to learn about the practice of international relations. View the photo series.

The European FET-Horizon2020 LMCat project of Dr. Irene Groot has released a promotional video showing the role graphene could play in our daily lives, how LMCat's production technique works, and how the consortium is capable of taking graphene production to the next level.

On 16 November 2018 Armin Cuyvers presented some legal strategies to soften the much criticized absolutist approach to autonomy by the European Court of Justice in Achmea. His main argument was that, as a general principle, autonomy can and should be weighed against other general principles.

Astronomer Koen Kuijken and physicist Tjerk Oosterkamp have each been awarded a major subsidy by NWO. The funding will allow them to construct new research facilities.

A new Horizon 2020 project has been awarded to Mingming Hu and Jeroen Guinée of the Department of Industrial Ecology of Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML).

Physics professor Jan Aarts starts a collaboration with chip manufacturer Intel to perform fundamental research in low-power, cryogenic computing.

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Conference

Anthropologist Marja Spierenburg talks in the Dutch newspaper NRC about the neoliberal system and how it has to change in order to solve the energy crisis in South-Africa.

Experimental physicist Jan Aarts has received a FOM Projectruimte grant of 545,000 euro. He will use the budget to study the interaction between superconducting currents and ferromagnetism. In the future, this might lead to computer memory with negligible energy consumption.

In a promotional video for the SUNRISE initiative, prof. Huub de Groot explains the impact and ideas behind artificial photosynthesis.

CML grants three Stans Awards each year, known as the best PhD paper, best student thesis and best outreach from the past year. The CML staff nominated students and colleagues and this year’s jury Prof.dr. Koos Biesmeijer and Prof.dr. Nicole de Voogd made the final decision.

A packaging-free shop, small mobile homes, solar panels on all Leiden's roofs… Jeroen Schrama, alumnus of Public Administration, is a creative world improver. ‘If we really want to save the world, we have to make much more radical choices.’

Leiden University celebrated the Relief of Leiden with the 3 October University. This year the University also took part in the festive parade, to promote 444.

Physicist Sense Jan van der Molen researches materials that do not exist in nature. ‘It’s fascinating to see how the properties of a material change if we manage to make it super thin.’ He will give his inaugural lecture on 21 October.

The Dick Stufkens Prize 2018 for the best PhD thesis of the Holland Research School of Molecular Chemistry (HRSMC) will be awarded to Dr Stefan Vuckovic. In his thesis, Vuckovic presents a new and innovative approach to the quantum mechanical calculation of atomic and molecular energies. It lays the…

Scientists have long been puzzled why it is easier to produce hydrogen from water in an acidic environment than in an alkaline environment. Marc Koper comes with an explanation: the reason is the electric field at the surface of the catalyst, which is larger in an alkaline environment, as he writes…

Hydrogen can help to solve the climate problem. At least, if we start producing it in the right, clean way. Leiden researchers mapped out the global environmental impact of hydrogen production and looked ahead to 2050. They published their work in Energy & Environmental Science.

‘A university is a slow-moving institution, which is in many ways a good thing,' commented student Josephine Rook at the opening of the Leiden University Green Office on 27 September in the Hortus botanicus. ‘Sustainability is not about following the latest trends, but about making structural improv…

An all-optical transistor, a molecule-sized sensor and a new kind of single-photon source for quantum communication. All dreamed applications of fundamental physics that are one step closer thanks to Robert Smit. On 12 June, he defended his PhD thesis with distinction.