The main aim of this thesis was to unravel the signaling and regulatory networks that drive tumor cell migration during breast cancer metastasis.

This edited volume by Jeff Fynn-Paul pushes forward the debate on the role of entrepreneurs in making war and building states in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

This thesis focuses on data found in the field of computational drug discovery. New insight can be obtained by applying machine learning in various ways and in a variety of domains. Two studies delved into the application of proteochemometrics (PCM), a machine learning technique that can be used to…

How do you ensure that a drug has an effect on the right protein – and nothing else? Chemist Anthe Janssen explored various methods for determining the selectivity of potential medicines. He also looked at the substance BIA 10-2474, after a man died in a French clinical trial in 2016. PhD defence on…

On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender that also brought an end to the Second World War in Asia, Indonesia declared its independence. The declaration was not recognized by the Netherlands, which resorted to force in its attempt to take control of the inevitable process of decolonization.…

What dose of medicine do you give a child? That depends to a large extent on how quickly their kidneys remove the drug from the blood. For ethical reasons it is impossible to measure this directly in little patients. PhD candidate Sinziana Cristea combined different types of modelling and lots of data…

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567-1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions.

Getting personal

Engin Kiliç defended his thesis on 11 june 2015

How do first-hand narratives of war of commanders in the front line relate to the official narrative of the Eighty Years’ War?

A new vision on the Revolt of the Low Countries through the eyes of Spanish commanders

Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli (Eds.) This book posits that democracy promotion played a key role in the Reagan administration’s Cold War foreign policy.

In Reframing the Diplomat Albertine Bloemendal offers a unique window onto the unofficial dimension of Cold War transatlantic relations by analyzing the diplomatic role of the Dutch Atlanticist Ernst van der Beugel as a government official and as a private diplomat.

This week 'Dutch Post-war Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis' by Peter Verstraten was published by Amsterdam University Press, the sequel to Humor and Irony in Dutch Post-war Fiction Film from 2016. Each chapter in his 482-page new study begins with a title of Fons Rademakers who made films…

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of…

This is the 2017 paperback release of William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, which won the 2013 Foreign Affairs Magazine Best Book of the Year.

The war between Ukraine and Russia is playing out not just on the battlefield but also on the geopolitical playing field of gas. Conflicts at the start of this century about this energy source were, says PhD candidate Ilia Barboutev, a precursor to today’s war.

Emily Wolff, PhD candidate at Leiden University, wrote a paper about the inclusion of imperial citizens in the Dutch post-war welfare state.

Drawing on the analogical lessons of the Great War, this article uses applied history to analyze how the four parallels discerned can help us make sense of contemporary Sino-American rivalry

Does foreign aid promote human rights?

This paper written by Alexandre Afonso, Assistant Professor and Researcher at Leiden University, argues that gender norms and the political strength of the left were important structuring factors regarding why European countries choose migrant labour to expand their labour force in the decades that…

Archives were a common target during the Second World War, and hundreds suffered damages. Among these archival losses, the losses to medieval manuscript collections stand out.

It takes years to develop new medicines, from the test tube to trials in humans. During the process it often happens that a drug that seems promising in the initial stage has to be dropped in a later phase. This costs time and money. Leiden University and the LUMC are working closely together to make…

Developing new drugs is a difficult process. With the aid of artificial intelligence, Pharmaceutical scientist Xuhan Liu has developed methods that can help make drug design cheaper and faster. PhD defence on 15 February.

Subproject of

States, we are told, have monopolized the legal right to wage war since the seventeenth century and this arrangement has provided some basic stability in international relations. But is this really true? This project challenges this classic account and opens the way for rethinking the contemporary laws…

This book explores the reception of foreign news during the late sixteenth-century civil wars in France and the Netherlands.

Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era

The territories that would make up what is today the Republic of Zambia officially became British in 1891. However, this did not equate to an on-the-ground presence of colonial authority capable of affecting the destiny and daily lives of people.

Pharmaceutical companies, governments and the general public have become increasingly aware that animal models used in drug testing lack vital aspects to serve as an accurate representation of human biology. As models of the human body should become more physiologically relevant, animal models no longer…

In this article, Thomas Maguire, assistant professor at the Institute of Governance and Global Affairs, examines the intelligence of the US, British and Ukrainian governments and NATO partners concerning Russia and its war against Ukraine. This article discusses how and why governments communicate intelligence…

Currently, more than 80% of drugs are used in an off-label manner in critically ill neonates.

Potential drugs that seem promising in the lab, but don’t show any activity in a person: they cost the industry an incredible amount of time and money. That’s why Indira Nederpelt focuses on a more efficient search for new drugs in her PhD, by determining the kinetics of a potential drug earlier on…

This interdisciplinary study focuses on (trans)national ethnic and popular networks, combining historical-ethnographic and computational methods to understand the ‘workings’ of networked conflict interfering in the increasingly violent conflict in the Sahel (Africa) and beyond. The project focuses on…

Laura Heitman has been awarded a VIDI grant for her innovative drug research. Heitman strives to optimize a drug’s binding kinetics at its target in order to ultimately fight diseases effectively. She even pleads for a paradigm shift in drug discovery.

An overview of our infrastructure at the SPP division:

Oncode Investigator Mario van der Stelt and his colleagues have discovered a new potential drug that suppresses chemotherapy induced neuropathic pain.

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

PhD defence

On 4 May, Leiden University remembered the victims of the Second World War from our university community. Alumni, students and present and former staff of the University came together for this Hour of Remembrance.

In the search for new medicines against diseases such as cancer, a Leiden team has developed a new workflow. This approach combines artificial intelligence (AI) with molecular modelling and is suitable for finding unknown and innovative drug structures, the researchers proved.

Political scientist Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden University) explains why Mozambique is not (yet) a success story.

Leiden chemists have developed a new technique with which they can determine the role of kinases – a group of proteins – in a living cell. This technique makes it easier to find new drug targets for diseases such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. The team published the findings in the journal Nature…

Jacques Waisvisz (98) is one of our oldest living alumni. As a Jewish student in the Second World War, he was forbidden from completing his studies. How does he look back at that time, and what was life like afterwards? ‘No one thought that the situation here would become so bad.’

Lecture, Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series