Professors Jos Raaijmakers (NIOO) and Gilles Van Wezel (IBL) received an STW Perspectief- grant of €3 million from the Dutch Technology Foundation and several supporting companies.

After decades of intensive farming, the peatland area is under pressure. Researchers, farmers and policymakers work together in the Polderlab to identify future-proof types of agriculture. ‘It’s unbelievable how quickly the system bounces back without intensive fertilisation.’

Mathematical and computational analysis of the dynamics of polar transport of the plant hormone auxin.

Many hot, rocky planets outside of our own solar system started out as large, gaseous Neptunes. This is what astronomers at Leiden University contend in a recent online publication.

Promotores: Prof.dr. E.F. van Dishoeck, Prof.dr. C.P. Dullemond

Promotor: Prof.dr. A.G.G.M. Tielens, Prof.dr. C. Dominik (UvA)

Paul Behrens and his team have won the Frontiers Planet Prize of half a million euros for their research into the effects of switching to a plant-based diet.

In every parliamentary system, people vote on political parties during an election instead of a president. It is very unlikely that one party gets the majority of the parliament. Therefore, a government is formed by negotiations between parties. In Belgium, this process is far more complicated than…

Pieter Omtzigt, leader of the ‘Nieuw Sociaal Contract’ (‘New Social Contract’) party, has withdrawn from talks to form a new Dutch government. Government finances are a divisive issue, and Ronald Plasterk’s decision to withhold documents on government finances seems to have particularly broken trust.…

What is the role of auxin in the initiation and process of somatic embryogenesis?

The work presented in this thesis is based on ALMA surveys of protoplanetary disks in three star-forming regions: Lupus, OMC-2, and NGC 2024.

Diverse types of exoplanets such as gas giants on close-in orbits (hot Jupiters) and young massive giants on wide orbits (super Jupiters), with no analogs in the Solar System, pose challenges but also opportunities to our understanding of planet formation and evolution.

The sustainable production of hydrogen could potentially be made more efficient by adding a cleverly chosen salt to the process. Researchers at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC), in collaboration with physicists at the University of Twente, have discovered that the type of salt present in the…

The ALMA Local Expertise Group (Allegro) is located in the Leiden Observatory (Sterrewacht). Professor Ewine van Dishoeck: ‘The Netherlands has played an important role in establishing ALMA. Thanks to this subsidy, we can now reap the scientific benefits.'

Circumstellar discs are the reservoirs of gas and dust that surround young stars and have the potential to become planetary systems.

Promotor: H.J.M. de Groot, Co-Promotor: A. Alia

The Basics and Applications to Plant Sciences will be held physical. See below for more information.

Which traits and/or trade-offs determine benefits of being deciduous or evergreen?

How do galaxies form? That is what astronomer Mariska Kriek will be researching in the coming years. She received an NWO Vici grant of 1.5 million euros to study galaxies in the early universe. ‘This research uses new and unprecedented observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These allow…

How do you progress from an immense gas cloud somewhere in the universe to a star with planets? Research by Astronomy PhD student Martijn van Gelder sheds more light on the earliest phases of this process. He will receive his doctorate on November 24th.

My work focuses on a class of astronomical objects called protoplanetary disks.

Stars like the sun are born in large molecular clouds existing from gas and dust. During the formation process, the chemical composition of the material can be altered drastically by the changing physical conditions.

Balsaminaceae is a diverse plant family characterized by a huge floral morphological diversity.

In this thesis chemical and physical processes in the ice mantles on interstellar dust grains are studied.

This thesis examines the link between simple molecules and the underlying structure and chemistry within protoplanetary disks - the birthplaces of planets.

Low-mass main-sequence stars like our Sun are continuous sources of outflowing hot magnetised plasma. In the case of the Sun, this is known as the solar wind, whereas for other stars they are called stellar winds.

Promotores: Prof.dr. J. Schaye & Prof.dr. C. Steidel (California Institute of Technology)

What are the behaviours of plant traits throughout various points in the growing season in a radiative transfer model framework and how well can this knowledge be integrated through data assimilation to provide priors for robust local and global vegetation products and analysis?

Promotor: Arjen Doelman, Co-promotor: Vivi Rottschäfer

To study how planetary systems come into existence we study much younger systems still in formation.

The formation and evolution of galaxies is fundamentally driven by the formation of new stars out of cold gas.

Promotor: M. Franx, Co-Promotor: I.F. Labbé

Which genes are involved in woodiness and associated traits such as drought tolerance, flowering time, stem elongation, life span, and plant herbivory, and how do these gene regulatory pathways overlap?

Simulations of galaxy formation provide much more information about galaxies than a telescope. Simulations have been improving significantly in recent years. Astronomer Evgenii Chaikin made such a significant contribution to this field that he graduated with honours on February 27th.

Promotores: Prof.dr. M. Franx, Prof.dr. M. Kriek (Univ. of California at Berkeley)

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…

How did dynastic organization – that it, the employment of non-ruling family members and the development of dynastic traditions and concepts – influence state formation in both Catholic Europe and Muslim West-Asia?

In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Northern-Netherlandish artists drew outdoors to train their hands and eyes, and to record landscapes and nature. In her inaugural lecture on 21 March 2022, Yvonne Bleyerveld, Professor by Special Appointment of Art on Paper and Parchment, draws our attention to a…

Understanding how galaxies form, interact, and evolve comes largely from comparing theory predictions with observational data. Numerical simulations of galaxies provide the most accurate approach to testing the theory, as they follow the non-linear evolution of gas and dark matter in great detail and…

On Friday, June 12th, the Europa Institute held its annual PhD Day.