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…

Workshop

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.

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

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…

On 28 and 29 April 2022 the conference ''Book Diplomacy’ in the Cultural Cold War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives' takes place at Leiden University. The keynote speaker during the conference is Professor Greg Barnhisel (Duqusense University). The conference aims to bring together a diverse group of…

Leiden University's International Honours College, Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) experienced empty halls and empty classrooms this past year on the residential campus on the Anna van Buerenplein in The Hague due to the global pandemic. Dr Paul Hudson designed a Covid-proof course that enabled…

With the end of the year coming to a close, it is time for a celebration. Twenty driven lecturers, among them 5 academic staff members of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs in The Hague, were awarded their Senior Teaching Qualification by Vice- Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl.

On April 12th three students majoring in Earth, Energy, and Sustainability (EES) from Leiden University College participated in the annual conference of the Netherlands Center for River Studies.

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.

Is our universe built up out of warm or cold dark matter? The standard model assumes cold dark matter particles, but astronomer Sylvia Ploeckinger is now testing the possibility of a warm counterpart: sterile neutrino’s. For this project, she received an NWO Physics/F grant, a special grant for women…

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.

To what extent does exoplanet Proxima b resemble our Earth? And is there some form of life present? Astronomers hope to find answers to these questions with the new European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). An NWO research grant of €18 million will allow a Dutch consortium to continue building instruments…

Mike Schmidli recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in American History. He introduces himself.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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…

Every year, the ‘Kluitersprijs’ is awarded to students who achieve excellent results in the minor Intelligence Studies.

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 new blog Afro-Asian Visions showcases new and ongoing research on Afro-Asian interactions through networks of artists, intellectuals, technical experts, and activists. It is designed as an online magazine.

Carolien Stolte lectures at the Institute for History within the Faculty of Humanities in Leiden. She intends to use her Veni grant to research the international networks of Indian activists during the period of decolonisation. We spoke to Carolien about her reaction.

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.

The Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea. Rerouting via South Africa is expensive, whereas the Arctic route only takes a week. Once a no-go zone, this route might be a more realistic option. Mind the nuclear submarines, though…

By looking at stars in dwarf galaxies research Bas Zoutendijk is trying to gain new insight into dark matter.

Mike Schmidli has been awarded a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). From September 2021, he will spend 5 months at NIAS working on his research project titled 'Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and U.S. Interventionism in the late Cold War'. Read the abstract of his…

Rebekka Grossmann awarded Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship for research on the effects of migration on visual codes of global solidarity

The legal protection of parents and children in cases involving placement in care must improve. That is the opinion of Mariëlle Bruning, Professor of Children and the Law.

On 14 September the construction of the Spui university building officially began.

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…

New results from the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) show that the Universe is almost 10 percent more homogeneous than previously thought. The new KiDS map was created using the partly Dutch OmegaCAM on ESO's VLT Survey Telescope on Cerro Paranal in Northern Chile. An international team of astronomers from,…

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…

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

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…

The Dutch scientist prof. dr. Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Leiden Observatory, Leiden University and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, will receive the 2018 James Craig Watson Medal from the american National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

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.

PhD defence