Plants are colonized by an astounding number of microorganisms that can provide different life-support functions, including nutrient acquisition and protection against (a)biotic stresses like drought or pathogen attack.

Artificial photosynthesis has recognised potential to produce green and sustainable fuels from earth-abundant resources such as water, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sunlight.

One of the key quests in astronomy is to study the growth and evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. Radio observations provide a powerful means of studying the formation of stars and subsequent buildup of distant galaxies, in a way that is unbiased by the presence of dust.

Can we distinguish the effects of pesticides from other abiotic and biotic factors that occur in the field? And how do these factors interact with pesticides?

In the Schouwburgstraat, LUGO is currently redesigning the back-garden in order to increase biodiversity and make it a more beautiful space. Throughout October 2023 until March 2024, we will be making changes to the garden with our team of volunteers.

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

This thesis presents the systematics, epidermal defense, and bioprospecting of wild orchids.

Discovery and development of Central Nervous System (CNS) drugs is hampered by high attrition rates.

Climate change is a challenge for both current and future generations. New biological resources have to be developed in order to meet the demand for energy as well as the demand for food.

We investigate the buildup of galaxies from various vantage points. The first two chapters focus on the stellar content of galaxies, especially the distribution of stellar masses at birth and potential variations therein in various galactic environments.

Whilst government’s ability to design ‘context-specific’ regional innovation policy is generally assumed to depend on the region’s decision-making power, the aim of this study is to investigate how regional government matters. In order to open up the black box of policy design, the study develops a…

Growth hormone profiles are pulsatile and highly variable between individuals, limiting the implementation of mathemathical models to quantify an individual's secretion.

In surface science there is great effort to move from studying simple, flat model surfaces in vacuum to investigating more complex model catalysts in gas environments (in situ). This thesis gives three examples of such studies using microscopy and spectroscopy.

In the last decades, activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) has emerged as a powerful chemical tool that may aid the ever-challenging drug discovery process.

Promotors: Prof.dr. P.J. Punt, Prof.dr. C.A.M.J.J. van den Hondel

Leiden University and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management are involved in a collaboration in the form of a research project titled 'Data-Driven Risk Assessment in Infrastructure Networks'

Material outflows from industrial economies.

Soil is a home for an unbelievable diversity and abundance of microbial life that is essential for supporting life on our planet.

The clinical potential of applying synthetic lethality to cancer treatment is famously demonstrated by the BRCA1/PARP1 paradigm: a tumor specific defect in BRCA1 – a component of the DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair pathway homologous recombination (HR) – results in a remarkable sensitivity to PARP1…

Ethiopian wolves are endangered diurnal Afroalpine rodent hunters. I investigated the interaction between wolves, rodents and human land use in Borena Sayint National Park (BSNP), Abune Yosef and Aboi Gara in Ethiopia.

Development of GHG calculator for bio-electricity and heat.

This monograph focuses on clustering of objects in high-dimensional data, given the restriction that the objects do not cluster on all the attributes, not even on a single subset of attributes, but often on different subsets of attributes in the data.

Op 11 november 2021 verdedigde Mariana Gkliati het proefschrift 'Systemic Accountability of the European Border and Coast Guard'. Het promotieonderzoek is begeleid door promotoren prof.dr. P. Rodrigues en prof.dr. L. Besselink (UvA).

One of the key limitations of the direct imaging of exoplanets at small angular separations are quasi-static speckles that originate from evolving non-common path aberrations (NCPA) to which the primary adaptive optics system is inherently blind. The main focus of this thesis is the development and…

Artificial intelligence algorithms govern in subtle, yet fundamental ways, the way we live and are transforming our societies. The promise of efficient, low‐cost or ‘neutral’ solutions harnessing the potential of big data has led public bodies to adopt algorithmic systems in the provision of public…

This thesis addresses the problem of designing performance and energy efficient embedded streaming systems, that is, systems which process a stream of input data coming from the environment and generate a stream of output data going into the environment.

Traditionally, vaccines are administered intramuscularly using conventional hypodermic needles, which cause pain and distress. Microneedles are very short needles (smaller than 1 mm) that are practically invisible to the naked eye.

Less than 1 in 10 drug candidates that enter phase 1 clinical trials actually gets approved for human use.

Interactive exploration of large volumes of data is increasingly common, as data scientists attempt to extract interesting information from large opaque data sets. This scenario presents a difficult challenge for traditional database systems, as (1) nothing is known about the query workload in advance,…

In populations with a seed-bank, individuals can temporarily become dormant and refrain from reproduction until they can become active again. The repository of all dormant individuals in the population is called the seed-bank. Seed-banks are observed in many taxa, including plants, bacteria and other…

1. To what extent do metallic NPs added to soil extractions change the activity, abundance, or community composition of microbes? 2. How do the effects of metallic NPs on soil microbes differ from the effects of the ions shedding from corresponding NPs?

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.A.G.J. Orrit

To gain more insight into the evolutionary development of orchid flowers and fruits, the orchid species Erycina pusilla was studied. The evolutionary origin of the median petaloid sepal, the callus on the labellum, and the stelidia was studied.

Tracing the evolution of the molecular gas content in galaxies is critical for a complete understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, as it provides the direct fuel for star formation. Studies of high-redshift (z>1) molecular gas reservoirs, most commonly traced by carbon monoxide (CO), have seen…

Wetlands provide many ecosystem goods and services which include fish production. The sustainability of small-scale fisheries (SSF) has received considerable attention in recent years because fish is one of the major sources of animal protein to a considerable fraction of the global population which…

Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen, Leids Instituut voor Chemisch Onderzoek (LIC)

Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen, Centrum voor Milieuwetenschappen Leiden (CML)

Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam organises a postgraduate seminar on current issues in religious studies and western esotericism. You can find the programme for the year 2023-2024 below.

As per January 1st, Niek Strohmaier is part of Kifid’s arbitration committee.

This thesis has shed light on some of the ways in which the local electrolyte composition can differ from the bulk and how these changes in the local reaction environment can determine the activity and/or selectivity of two important electrocatalytic reactions, namely, electrochemical CO2 reduction…

Gamic Learning in East Asian Studies - Wat kunnen spellen ons vertellen over de manier waarop mensen leren?

In this thesis, we study travelling waves in stochastic reaction-diffusion equations. We extend techniques from the deterministic theory for travelling waves to apply to the stochastic version, which allows us to compute the stochastic wave speed and shape, and draw conclusions on the stability of the…

The research described in this Thesis was aimed at designing and synthesizing nature-inspired compounds as part of TB vaccine discovery.

The first direct detection of gravitational waves opened the possibility of mapping the Universe via this new and independent messenger.

In my thesis I study Majorana fermions from three different perspectives. The first one corresponds to non-interacting Majorana fermions that, however, pose non-trivial topological properties. The second one corresponds to strongly interacting Majoranas and the third to relic neutrinos. No one knows…

EXIOBASE is a global, detailed Multi-regional Environmentally Extended Supply and Use / Input Output (MR EE SUT/IOT) database. It was developed by harmonizing and detailing SUT for a large number of countries, estimating emissions and resource extractions by industry, linking the country EE SUT via…

We analyse the link between media consumption and the attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS in Chile. We used data from a sample of 1000 people, obtained in the 2011 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS). We use a logistic binary regression model by maximum likelihood. Our results suggest that…

This thesis examines silicon pore optics (SPO), a technology that exploits silicon wafers from the semiconductor industry to create extremely high quality X-ray optics, by studying its manufacturing process, applications, and prospects.