Paco Barona Gomez is the newest associate professor at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL). The Mexican researcher is fascinated by the evolution of natural products: compounds made by microbes, but also plants and animals. ‘It’s like we investigate chemical dark matter.’

Researchers, policymakers and funders have to take more account of the effect of sex and gender in scientific research. This is the view presented in an advice paper published by LERU, the League of European Research Universities. The lead author is Vice-Rector Simone Buitendijk.

Nine talented Leiden researchers have been awarded a Vidi subsidy by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Vidis are intended for researchers with several years of research experience who want to set up or expand their own line of research.

To inhibit proteins that contribute to the growth of aggressive cancer cells, that’s the plan of Professor Bob van de Water and his team. They will receive over 700,000 euros from the KWF Dutch Cancer Society for their research. Researcher Maaike Vreeswijk and pathologist Danielle Cohen are affiliated…

The Dutch National Research Agenda announced today that it will provide 17 research projects with a total of 61 million euros in funding. Researchers from Leiden University or the Leiden University Medical Center are involved in five of the projects. All of the projects are interdisciplinary partnerships…

What started as an idea during a social gathering led to an unexpected breakthrough in research on resistant bacteria. Biologists and chemists from Leiden developed a new substance that proves to be effective against bacteria resistant to antibiotics. They published their discovery in Nature Chemist…

A new 5.7 million euro research project will ensure that lettuce will be more resistant to pathogens and climate effects and will grow better in new cultivation systems. Together with other Dutch researchers, Leiden biologists will map the characteristics and genetic information of 500 wild and cultivated…

LUMC and Leiden University will start the new two-year online master's program in Transfusion Medicine and Cellular and Tissue Therapies from October 2023.

The first Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation In Citation Analysis has been granted to Jian Wang, Assistant Professor in the Science Based Business Program at Leiden University.

Three Leiden researchers have been awarded a prestigious Vici grant, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) announced on Tuesday. Two of the researchers work at Leiden University and the third at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC).

We use zebrafish as a model organism to study human development and disease as well as animal welfare and environmental impact.

Hardly anyone in the Netherlands ever watches skeleton racing. But we’ll soon be glued to our TV sets when ‘our’ Kimberley Bos slides down the track at the Olympic Games. All because she stands a good chance of winning a medal. Why do we like winners so much?

On March 21 2018, a study was published in Nature, co-authored by Professor M. Soressi from the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University, announcing the sequencing of five new Neandertals, raising the number of high-coverage sequenced Neandertals from two to seven. A tooth lost by a Neandertal woman…

On Monday the 8th of December, the annual symposium of the IBL will be organized at the main building of the LUMC Leiden. This year’s theme is “Integrative Biology towards Healthy Communities”.

The Lowlands pop festival is inviting scientists to make proposals for research at this year's festival (19 to 21 August).

In April, the X-omics initiative was granted 17 million euros from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research. The subsidy is part of the National Roadmap for large-scale scientific infrastructure, intended to build or renew large-scale research facilities. What new insights will this investment…

Publication by: Vanessa Frodermann, Janine van Duijn, Gijs van Puijvelde, Peter van Santbrink, Max Lagraauw, Margreet de Vries, Paul Quax, Ilze Bot, Amanda Foks, Saskia de Jager and Johan Kuiper. Journal of Internal Medicine. 2016;279:592-605.

For her research on social-emotional regulation in children Michelle Achterberg on Wednesday, May 25 2022 received the Dutch Association of Developmental Psychology (VNOP) Dissertation Prize. With her PhD research, she mapped out which mechanisms play a role in social emotion regulation in childhood.…

Leiden physicist Maarten Kruithof has discovered how our DNA is infallibly able to fold itself and to unfold again. In his dissertation he demonstrates how DNA is folded in a single long, very flexible spiral.

This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to the three American researchers who have unravelled the mechanism behind the biological clock. Joke Meijer, Professor of Neurophysiology and an expert in the field of the sleep-wake rhythm, explained in Dutch newspapers Trouw and NRC why this discovery is…

Four Leiden researchers will be gaining experience at prominent international research research institutes funded by a Rubicon subsidy from NWO. One international researcher will be coming to Leiden.

Joris van der Voet’s article “Organizational Decline and Innovation in Public Organizations: A Contextual Framework of Cutback Management” won the 2019 Camilla Stivers Award for best article in Perspectives on Public Management and Governance.

Members of our research team give different types of presentations and lectures.

Lecture, seminar

Leiden scientists are the main applicants for five projects that have been awarded a Science Groot grant of up to 3 million euros in the Science Domain. In addition, several Leiden scientists are involved in other projects that have been awarded funding.

Data and information should be stored in a way that computers can understand, says Barend Mons, professor of Biosemantics at the Leiden University Medical Center and Chair of the High Level Expert Group for the European Open Science Cloud. We speak with him about FAIR data, knowlets and nanopublicat…

This year, NWO has awarded a Veni subsidy to 143 young researchers who have recently obtained their PhD. 17 of these researchers are at Leiden University and one works at the LUMC. The successful applicants will each receive 250,000 euro to develop their ideas and carry out research over a period of…

Professor Eline Slagboom has been studying multiple generations of families for over 20 years. She collects data on why some people age healthily and others decline early.

Mathematician Oliver Nagy still vividly remembers the first time he learned about a random walk. ‘The lecturer told us to imagine a company of drunken students who wander in the streets. At each intersection, they would spin one of them around and all would go in the direction where he or she came to…

A full overview of BPOC/SSNMR PhD theses.

Some bacteria, it turns out, have proteins much like ours that organise the DNA in their cells. They just do it a bit differently. This is revealed by new research from biochemists at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry and the Max Planck Institute for Biology. The discovery helps us better understand…

Students gain practical experience while clients receive a solution to their software needs: the student software company LUDev hits two birds with one stone. ‘Through LUDev, students learn what else is involved in software development besides programming.’ Interested? You can now submit new projects…

‘Praesidium Libertatis is a daily responsibility.’ These were the words of Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker on 8 February during the 443rd Dies Natalis of Leiden University. The University needs to pay continuous attention to open debate if it wants to remain a bastion of freedom.

Burnout is on the increase. It is caused by group pressure, being ‘on’ all the time and asking too much of ourselves. Clinical psychologist Bart Verkuil advises lowering our expectations.

Inaugural lecture

Introducing prof. Scott Nelson, the Legum Professor of the Social Sciences at William and Mary, and on the spring exchange at the University of Leiden.

PhD defence

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.

For decades, scholars have wondered about the development and dissemination of languages around the world. What are the odds that peoples living thousands of miles apart speak varieties of Indo-European languages that are closely related? This riddle has now partly been solved thanks to an international…

Former dean and physicist Frans Saris writes in his new book ‘Darwin’s combination lock’ how our culture enabled us to dominate nature and about the corresponding responsibilities. Together with Joris Berkhout he will talk about his book during the This Week’s Discoveries on 27 February.

When foreign matter enters our body, our immune system has to make a choice whether or not to go on the attack. There are times when the system goes wrong, and we end up with an illness or an allergic reaction. Researchers at LUMC are trying to steer the immune system. The dossier on Immunity, Infection…

It might be possible to prevent atherosclerosis by changing the appearance of macrophages, cells of the immune system that for example digest foreign substances. In her PhD dissertation, Baoyan Ren examined several ways to do so.

Merijn de Bakker and colleagues of the IBL-research group of Prof. Mike Richardson provide a unique view on digit evolution in crocodiles and birds in their recent study published in Nature.

Clinical psychologist Bernet Elzinga has been appointed as Professor of a personal chair at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. This professorship will contribute both nationally and internationally to the broader promotion of Leiden University in the field of stress and psychopathology.

Women are more often diagnosed with depression, whereas ADHD is much more frequently detected in men. And there are other more striking differences. What role does the brain play in mental health and what is the influence of the environment? For answers to these questions, listen to the ‘(Un)gendered…

The government is investing 646 million euros and has set aside a further 3.5 billion to drive economic growth in the Netherlands. Much of the National Growth Fund will be used for scientific innovations. Leiden University is involved in three of the projects.

The Dutch X-omics Initiative has received seventeen million euros from NWO as part of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Infrastructure. Leiden University’s metabolomics research led by Thomas Hankemeier is one of the participators.

A team of laboratory astrophysicists from Leiden University managed to make glycerol under conditions comparable to those in dark interstellar clouds. They allowed carbon monoxide ice to react with hydrogen atoms at minus 250 degrees Celsius. The researchers publish their findings in the Astrophysical…