Leiden professor of Cellular Immunology of Parasitic Infections Maria Yazdanbakhsh receives the prestigious NWO Spinoza Prize this year. This, in many ways, border-crossing scientist contributes with her research to more effective vaccines against parasitic infections and better medication for inflammatory…

Arjen Doelman (Leiden University), Max Rietkerk (Utrecht University), Ehud Meron (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) and Isla Myers-Smith (University of Edinburgh) received an ERC Synergy grant of 10 million euros with their RESILIENCE project. The researchers will investigate whether and how tipping…

A year ago, assistant professor Paz Gonzalez received a Comenius grant to start an academic journal for and by students. Now the first double issue of The New Scholar is a reality. ‘We want to show the faculty’s diversity.’

Alireza Mashaghi and his research team have created a new framework to understand shapes of proteins and DNA. With this framework, many diseases can be understood better.

Together with a large international team of scientists, researchers Peter van Bodegom and Nadia Soudzilovskaia of the Leiden Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) have created maps of variability in plant trait distribution across the globe. The new maps have been published in Proceedings of the…

Annelot did an internship with the crisis management team of ‘Rijkswaterstaat’. During her internship, she was involved in improving an app used for information management during crisis situations.

This week Dr. Lara Weiss (of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden), who together with Dr Christian Greco (of the Museo Egizio in Turin) heads the project "The Walking Dead: The Making of a Cultural Geography in Saqqara", was visited by the NVIC team. During the visit she introduced them to the…

From pipetting in the lab to shining in front of the camera at a global student event. With 8.000 viewers watching the livestream, Marjolein Crooijmans presented the iGEM Giant Jamboree in Paris.

An online platform with instructive and social challenges to prepare students for the changing job market. This idea won the Piece of Skill team the Deans’ Challenge on 27 August. In this competition students invent solutions for global issues, selected by deans of Leiden University.

Staff and students from the Faculty of Archaeology are just back from a newly started Field School in the inland of Portugal.

Fijs van Leeuwen, Professor of Radiology, Molecular Imaging and Image-Guided Therapy, advocates an open and respectful academic culture that always puts the patient first. He delivered his inaugural lecture on 13 November.

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

The archive of a 17th-century postmaster has been discovered in the Museum for Communication in The Hague. Using new scanning techniques, the international research team Signed, Sealed & Undelivered, headed by literary scholar Nadine Akkerman from Leiden University and historian David van der Linden…

A team of Leiden researchers has won the Ammodo Science Award for innovative humanities research on perceptions of cultural heritage.

In the Netherlands, 1.55 million people suffer from cardiovascular diseases. Yet, acute cardiovascular events, such as a heart attack or stroke, often occur unexpectedly. That is because many people do not know they are at risk for such an event. Immunological researcher Amanda Foks and her colleagues…

Using photosynthesis to generate energy, or using enzymes to effectively produce biofuel; Leiden chemists Huub de Groot en Hermen Overkleeft have both obtained an NWO TOP funding for their pioneering research. With the money they can take on new PhD students.

Two bacterial species team up inside the plant root system to rescue their host from fungal infection. This was discovered by a team of microbiologists and bioinformaticians from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, Wageningen University, and the Institute of Biology Leiden. They also identified the…

Yisheng Development is to design the entrance area to the Leiden Bio Science Park. Leiden University and the municipality of Leiden selected this Amstelveen-based project developer on the basis of their sustainable design for a vibrant campus. The design provides a combination of residential, working…

An international group of scientists has discovered that certain cells of our immune system – the so-called T cells – communicate with each other and work together as a team. To fight an infection they stimulate each other’s growth, but at the same time, they inhibit each other when there is a surplus…

The Mesoamerican research group 'Time in Intercultural Context: the indigenous calendars of Mexico and Guatemala' funded by the ERC and directed by prof. dr. Maarten Jansen, met up in Mexico from the 13th until the 23rd of February for a field seminar in the states of Tlaxcala and Hidalgo.

Climate interventions do not lead to more climate action among Dutch, but they do raise awareness about climate change.

For the first time, contagious yawning has now also been found in a species that roams its territory mostly in solitude and is less frequently engaged in social interactions: the orangutan. Publication in Nature Scientific Reports by an international group of scientists with lead-author Evy van Berlo,…

Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite sensitivity of MUSE allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the…

Dr. Sara Brandellero, expert in Lusophone literatures and cultures and member of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, will lead a research project about urban night life and migration, culture and integration in eight European cities. The project aims to support community well-being…

Are you keen to beat your friends or colleagues and win the European Championship football pool? Statistician Marjolein Fokkema has some tips that might increase your chances.

‘Violence as a Population Health Problem’ is one of 33 interdisciplinary projects that have been launched thanks to a Kiem grant. The project team will analyse a large patient database to identify links between violence and other health problems. ‘Violence can also be an expression of other factors,’…

In the programme NWO Open Competition Domain Science - GROOT, twenty new consortia will start a large research project. This boost of more than 47 million euros will make new research possible in the science domain. Among the winners is the Nanoscale Regulators of Photosynthesis consortium in which…

The PhD Project “Agents of change? (Hi)stories, perspectives, and every-day practices of intra-Schengen border officials” as carried out by PhD Candidate Maryla Klajn got off to a flying start.

Daily-adapted radiotherapy can help to more precisely target radiation dose to tumors compared to the current clinical practice, while avoiding radiosensitive organs-at-risk in the surrounding area. A main obstacle however is that new treatment plans need to be created every day, which is a manual and…

A European consortium has provided a disruptive technological breakthrough to allow the discovery and characterization of novel enzymes for industrial biotechnology. The technology will open the way to more efficient industrial processes such as in the biofuel, animal feed and paper and pulp industr…

How can we further streamline the development of software for the government? Leiden University and ICTU are to investigate this in a joint research project that was launched on 6 July 2016.

Prof. David Fontijn’s Economies of Destruction team was invited by Museum Midtjylland to participate in this year’s excavation in Boest, Jutland (Denmark). The exceptional site of Boest includes burial mounds, an alignment and depositions, consisting of axes, spearheads and rings, dating to the Bronze…

igraph, an important open source network analysis library, will receive two grants of $400,000 (approximately €340,000) over the course of the next two years.

How do we promote sustainable alternatives in lower-income households, how do we make construction sites energy neutral, and, how can we make cities greener in a sustainable way? Friday 25 October you can tackle these challenges and work on a climate proof Leiden, together with other citizens. Hoe…

Using N2 dissociation on Ru(0001) as a representative showcase (for catalysts employed in the Haber-Bosch process), we have shown for the first time that non-adiabatic effects can substantially reduce a molecule’s dissociation probability on a metal surface. These effects are currently completely unaccounted…

A research team from Leiden University, in cooperation with Bureau Boekhoorn Sociaal-Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek en Advies (BBSO), is to evaluate Dutch counterterrorism legislation.

From March 1, Alenka Prinčič will be the new Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University Libraries. Her expertise in the areas of Research Support, Research Infrastructures and Open Publishing as well as her longstanding experience as a manager are excellent starting points…

On the second floor of the Sylvius Laboratory, new labs are being built for researchers of the Faculties of Social and Behavioural Sciences and Humanities. After a successful tender construction has recently started.

The 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize has been awarded jointly to Wessel Kraaij, Alan Smeaton, Paul Over and George Awad for the “TRECVid Video Retrieval Evaluation 2003-2018”.

The scientific world is a competitive place. Even so, researchers are often prepared to share their findings with colleagues. This applies particularly to men as a group: women are much less willing to share their work, whether it is with other women or with men. This discovery was made by Leiden and…

A respectable 5,023 runners took part in the Leiden Canal Run on Friday 5 April. They raised the sum of €22,302 for various Leiden charities.

On June 10, Michelle Achterberg received the prize for best dissertation from the Dutch Neurofederation, the network of Dutch neuroscientists, for her thesis 'Like me, ore else...'. Achterberg obtained her doctorate cum laude from the Gravitation Program 'Samen Uniek' of the Leiden Consortium on Individual…

The new scholarly journal ‘Voetbal- & Sportjuridische Zaken’, published by Boom Juridische Uitgevers, will focus on current legal aspects related to sport with particular attention for football.

More and more, software incorporates components of Machine Learning. Joost Visser, professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), is invited as keynote speaker at the seventh Dutch national symposium on software engineering (SEN) to talk about this topic.

This week the good news broke as the Egyptian authorities have given their permission to continue the excavations in Saqqara in 2019!

Four bachelor’s students in archaeology have embarked on a month-long field school in Aruba. They will work with Harold Kelly, a local archaeologist at the National archaeological museum of Aruba, and with the research team of Island(er)s at the Helm.

Warm Sweater Day, February 7th & Week of Sustainability, February 10th-14th

Coming semester Karen Vet will be joining our team as the new intern. She has a BA in Middle Eastern Studies from Leiden University, specializing in Arabic language and culture.

Light can be used to apply forces on single cells. Focused lasers have been used by physicists to tweeze particles and to manipulate them. These so called “optical tweezers” can be used as mechanical phenotyping tools for characterising the mechanics of materials and living objects.

A collection of interviews from the oral history project