One of LUCIR’s key objectives is to bring together scholars and students of International Relations. To this end, LUCIR regularly organises events such as conferences, roundtables, lectures and book launches.

We are doing all we can to save energy at the university. Find out how you as a member of staff or student can do about energy and help reduce CO2 emissions.

Correctly interpreting the patterns of fire evidence in the archaeological record will illuminate the origin of human fire use.

The

How are the building blocks of life formed?

In the near future oral polio vaccine (OPV) will be replaced by inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) as part of the eradication program of polio. For that reason, there is a need for substantial amount of safe and more affordable IPV for low-income countries. Bioneedles, which are biodegradable mini-implants,…

A single self-assembled semiconductor quantum dot in a high-finesse optical microcavity - the subject of this thesis - is an interesting quantum-mechanical system for future quantum applications. For instance, this system allows trapping of an extra electron and thus can serve as a spin quantum memory,…

The second and final volume of this co-authored study has just been published by J.B. Metzler. This second monograph explores the history of the concept of barbarism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As a critical commemoration of its centenary, this book presents a mosaic of one hundred carefully curated fragments by expert authors, shedding light on politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts in a hundred years of Turkey.

Leiden University began the construction of a new University Sports Centre in collaboration with the construction and design firm Binx Smartility. The current sports center no longer meets sustainability requirements and is also becoming too cramped. The building will also serve as an examination ce…

Meet the core staff behind Global Transformations and Governance Challenges, which consists of a Professor, a Postdoctoral Researcher, a PhD Candidate, and multiple Programme Officers and Assistants.

How did disability become a global concern? In this project we will identify the contribution of international agencies, governmental and non-governmental organizations and, just as importantly, disabled people themselves, to the IYDP and by showing the connections, interactions and entanglements between…

Promotor: Prof.dr. W.Th.F. den Hollander, Co-promotor: R. Fernandez

The main aim of this project is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order…

Stochastic resetting is simple enough to be approached analytically, yet modifies stochastic processes in a non-trivial way.

Three major cosmology-focused missions are planned for the next decade: the Euclid space telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The parabolic Anderson model (PAM), which is the Cauchy problem for the heat equation with random potential. The PAM is a mathematical model that describes how mass (i.e. matter or energy) flows in a medium in the presence of a field of sources and sinks.

This thesis explores Breaking of Ensemble Equivalence (BEE) in random graph models by examining the spectral properties of adjacency matrices. The goal is to identify spectral characteristics that differentiate random graph ensembles, enhancing the understanding of complex network structures and beh…

Leiden scientists will be working on the development of a camera for the European Extremely Large Telescope that is currently under construction. On 28 September the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy signed an agreement with the European Southern Observatory.

Issues such as climate change, the depletion of natural resources or social inequality are too complex to be addressed from a single scientific discipline or by a single country. Leiden University has the expertise to bring the resolution of these enormous problems a small step closer.

With a special symposium at Museum Boerhaave, ESO celebrated its 60th anniversary on Monday, 26 September. More than 100 scientists, politicians and people from industry were present to look back on collaborations, milestones and discoveries. Leiden astrochemist Ewine van Dishoeck was one of the pre…

The radio sky harbours both galactic and extragalactic sources of arcminute- to degree-scale emission of various physical origins. To discover extragalactic diffuse emission in the Cosmic Web beyond galaxy clusters, one must image low–surface brightness structures amidst a sea of brighter compact fore-…

In astronomy, the interpration of observations and measurements plays a crucial role: we rely purely and fundamentally on the information that reaches us as observers. And 80% of all matter in the universe is undetectable directly.

Collecting as much information as possible about administering a new medicine to people can save a lot of money.

We explore the possibilities to combine magnetic resonance techniques with atomic force microscopy together in a single microscope: the MRI-AFM, also called Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy (MRFM).

In Quantum mechanics, particles can be in multiple positions simultaneously. Yet, when a measurement is made, the particle is found only in one place. Technology has come to a point where we may design experiments that will tell us how.

Radiation can be used to determine the isotope ratio of a skeleton. This provides information about where our ancestors lived and what they consumed. Dr Andrea Waters has developed a revolutionary method that can trace patterns of consumption from tens of thousands of years ago.

The central question is whether the current regime of international humanitarian law governing the conduct of hostilities in armed conflict is still adequate to deal with modern conflict scenarios, or whether it needs revision or amendment.

Plant Sciences' contribution to the Development & Disease research theme is to unravel the processes that allow plants to adapt to changing abiotic and biotic environmental conditions or stresses, with the aim to contribute to the sustainable production of food, flowers and bio-based products using…

An international team of researchers led by Alice Booth (Leiden University, the Netherlands) have discovered methanol in the warm part of a planet-forming disk. The methanol cannot have been produced there and must have originated in the cold gas clouds from which the star and the disk formed. Thus,…

The METIS instrument that’s being built for ESO's future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Northern Chile under the leadership of the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) has reached an important milestone: the preliminary design has been approved.

Early hominins probably lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before using fire to alleviate the winter cold, to cook or to make tools. It was only in the period betwen 300,000 and 400,000 years ago that the first finds were made that indicate that people had the ability to control fire…

The Municipality of The Hague, Leiden University and CBRE Investment Management (CBRE IM) will together try to realise a University building in the former Hudson’s Bay premises at Grote Marktstraat 48-50/Spui 3. This will facilitate the growth of Campus The Hague. A cooperation agreement was signed…

Marije Groos was a PhD researcher at the LUCAS. She completed her thesis on socio-political engagement in Dutch literary periodicals of the fifties. Her promoters are Yra van Dijk, professor of Modern Dutch Literature, and Ton Anbeek, emeritus professor of Modern Dutch Literature.

You might be wondering what the reconstruction of the former V&D store at Spui in The Hague looks like now. If so, you can come and find out for yourself. On Saturday 8 June 2024, from 10.00 – 13.00 hrs., the building site of the new Campus The Hague Leiden University Building will be open to the pu…

The Netherlands is informal, friendly and welcoming. Everyone can feel at home here, regardless of religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation. The Dutch speak many languages and the countryside and cities are easy and safe to travel through, by any means of transport. No matter where you come…

A new way to decipher the light from distant worlds could give us unmistakable evidence of extraterrestrial photosynthesis, and maybe alien plants, finds astronomy author Colin Stuart in the New Scientist. In his article, he describes the work of the group led by Leiden astronomer Rob van Holstein.…

Physicists at Virginia Tech in the US investigated how a soap bubble freezes to become a beautiful ice dome. This only happens when the surrounding air is cold enough, otherwise the dome collapses. LION-researcher Daniela Kraft comments. 'This had never been researched before. I think it is beautiful…

LCD screens use liquid crystals which have a high degree of order, even though they form a fluid. A new theory maps out the interplay between order, temperature and symmetry. Publication in Physical Review X.

‘Three books published within a year – that happens only once in a lifetime!’ This was the reaction of Katarzyna Cwiertka, Professor of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University, on the publication of Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War, one of her three new books. The book sketches the colonisation of…

Nanodiamonds and charcoal in Dutch soil provide no evidence for the alleged impact of a meteorite at the end of the last Ice Age. This is the conclusion of a research done by Utrecht University in collaboration with Leiden University and the University of Groningen.

An international team led by Leiden astronomers has, after years of searching and defying the boundaries of a telescope, for the first time directly captured polarised light from an exoplanet. From this light they can deduct that a disk of dust and gas orbits the exoplanet. In this disk moons are possibly…

Leiden PhD researcher Karin Öberg is one of the 17 winners of the NASA Hubble Fellowship. When she has obtained her PhD this autumn she will move to the United States for three years to conduct post-doctoral research into the role of ice in star formation.

Since itch and pain can be very burdensome, especially when individuals suffer from (either of) these symptoms chronically, it is important to know the factors by which these sensations are influenced. It becomes more and more clear that psychological factors play an important role in the experience…