With the new Euclid satellite, scientists are going to map a large part of the sky. The satellite ofthe European Space Agency (ESA) will soon give them a better view of the galaxies and matter in the universe. Professor of Galactic Astronomy Koen Kuijken and a team of Dutch scientists are receiving…

European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, gave a warning in the Europa Lecture on 14 June about large companies that abuse their power. 'An honest society begins with honest markets.'

Maurits Berger's new English-language podcast, Matters of Humanities: History of Islam in Europe covers no fewer than thirteen centuries of history. In eight episodes, professor of Islam and the West Maurits Berger argues that the Islam and Muslims are an important part of European history: ‘That was…

‘No choice is forever’, states Tracy Evans. ‘You can change your mind and go in a different direction when the circumstances change.’ When Tracy was 60 years old, she felt the need for a change herself. It lead to her earning a PhD degree six years later.

Natalia Grincheva (2020). Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8153-6999-8, 164 pp., £27.99 (paperback).

Accreditations. All study programmes have to deal with them and once every six years they cause a good amount of tension. How do you survive the assessment panel? And how does an accreditation proceed in times of corona? Chair of education Kim Beerden recently coordinated the accreditation for the research…

'An international environment is my natural habitat. I really thrive when I am in a setting where I am around people of all kinds of countries and cultures.'

Judicial officers have some leeway in how they act. In most cases that's fine, but it can also lead to abuses, such as ethnic profiling. It is easy to forget that these are not isolated decisions, but are also part of a framework of formal policies. Professor Maartje van der Woude calls for more comprehensive…

Storm clouds are gathering for the European grants for ‘excellent’ research. Researchers therefore need to explain how important these grants are. This is what Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the European Research Council (ERC), had to say during a visit to Leiden University on Thursday 24 Apr…

Prisoners who are visited regularly by family or friends are less likely to be reconvicted in the short term than inmates who rarely or never receive visits. Visits should therefore be encouraged and facilitated, according to PhD candidate Maria Berghuis, who will defend her doctoral thesis on 23 June…

By delivering his inaugural lecture titled ‘Where Science Meets Business,’ Simcha Jong accepted his appointment as Leiden’s first Professor of Science Based Business. In his lecture in the Large Auditorium of the Academy Building, Simcha argued that broad universities with a focus on fundamental research,…

Let’s admit it, in an era of fast paced global dynamics and growing society needs, biotech becomes crowned as the king among the “coolest” industries. Boston is considered to be at the heart of these biotech events. What it really is though, is the heart of innovation itself. There is a very strong…

Crime victims cannot always fully exercise their rights, said Maarten Kunst, Professor of Criminology, in his inaugural lecture on 26 October. His mission is to find out why exactly this is and to see whether change can be brought about.

Leiden has an international reputation as a stronghold of knowledge about cultures worldwide. Under the umbrella name of LeidenGlobal, Leiden University, the National Museum of Antiquities, the Natioial Museum of Ethnology and five research institutes are working together to disseminate this knowledge…

Audible Absence: Searching for the Site in Sound Production

Clothes by big Western brands that are on sale in Dutch shops are sometimes made by North Korean workers. The Dutch state is co-financer of a motorway that is being built in Pakistan by exploited workers. These are the conclusions of a report published by the LeidenAsiaCentre on 2 April.

It is partly thanks to Leiden professor Michel Orrit that we are today able to study individual molecules. He just missed winning a Nobel Prize, but is today the recipient of another important scientific award: NWO’s prestigious Spinoza Prize.

This year, the second Hugo Weiland Thesis Prize of the Foundation for Austrian Studies has been awarded. This prize, in honour of the founder and long-standing chair of the Foundation of Mr. Weiland, is awarded to high quality theses dedicated to the history, culture, and politics of Austria and Central…

Wil Roebroeks, Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology in Leiden, is to be awarded the ‘Academy Professors Prize’ of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Roebroeks has drastically changed academic thinking about the behaviour of early hominins and our knowledge of the earliest colonisation…

China is an important partner of Leiden University. We collaborate with more than 20 Chinese universities and welcome around 400 Chinese Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students.

Digitisation and poor reception of refugees are putting children’s rights at risk. This warning comes from Professor Ton Liefaard. His department is organising a summer school on this issue.

When we think of the history of Dutch slavery, the areas that spring to mind are primarily the Antilles and Suriname. However, until the end of the eighteenth century there were also Dutch plantation colonies in neighbouring Guyana. Bram Hoonhout’s book ‘Borderless Empire’ describes this forgotten h…

The whole world gets raw materials from Latin America, but at the expense of nature. Håvar Solheim researches the role of organised crime in this environmental crime and Soledad Valdivia researches sustainable urban initiatives in Latin America. What do these university lecturers think the future of…

Victims who claim damages from large corporations for the harm caused by an infringement of competition law are often powerless in the European Union. How could collective actions enhance their position? Zygimantas Juska will defend his doctoral thesis on 23 April.

Rembrandt van Rijn was enrolled as a student of the arts at Leiden University, but he was more interested in becoming a painter. What traces now remain of this famous phantom student?

Curiosities from the anatomical theatre, swords from the fencing school and 17th-century portraits of the University's founders. The new University Room in Museum De Lakenhal portrays the turbulent first hundred years of Leiden University.

A series of upcoming activities by PhDArts co-director Janneke Wesseling, docARTES researchers Bobby Mitchell, Giuliano Bracci, and Dick de Graaf, and PhDArts researchers Brigitte Kovacs, Danne Ojeda, Jack Segbars, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Ato Malinda, and Thalia Hoffman

If you replace the standard hydrogen atoms in ice with a heavier variant, something odd happens. The volume occupied by the molecules increases by 0.1 per cent. Leiden chemist Jörg Meyer and his colleagues have created a theoretical model that describes this behaviour. Their research appeared on the…

The channel through which two cell components exchange material appears to form at the edge of their contact surface, and not in the middle. This was discovered by the Leiden physical chemists Jelger Risselada and Edgar Blokhuis together with researchers from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.…

Software development is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a sociologist. Three years ago, John Boy began developing his software package Textnets. Because of Corona, he was less able to concentrate on writing scientific research and also setting up the online courses…

Former archaeology student Ivo Verheijen made a unique discovery in Schöningen in Germany: the almost complete skeleton of an extinct Eurasian straight-tusked elephant. The remains show that our ancestors enjoyed the odd elephant steak. But they weren’t the only ones…

Since the credit crisis erupted, drastic cutbacks have been made in all kinds of public sector organisations, creating some very difficult choices for the top civil servants who had to implement them in their own organisation. This is the conclusion of Public Administration scholar Eduard Schmidt, whose…

A long-term mathematical collaboration between South Africa and Leiden will continue with the appointment of Marcel de Jeu as professor by special appointment at the University of Pretoria. He will be working in the field of Positivity.

Professor of Higher Education Estela Mara Bensimon approaches diversity from a specific viewpoint. Examine and reflect on your own motives, is her advice to lecturers. Do you know for sure that you don't treat students from minority groups differently?

Meet the newest Full Professor at the Leiden Observatory: Joe Hennawi. All the way from Santa Barbara, California, Hennawi will strengthen the astronomy institute. In Leiden, he will use his recent ERC Advanced Grant to study how supermassive black holes come into existence.

Indigenous philosophies have been ignored for too long. This prompted Osiris González Romero to study the wisdom of the Nahua in Mexico. Their philosophy has an important message for the consumption society: see the earth and nature as living beings and not just as resources. PhD defence 22 June.

No matter how hard Chinese communists tried to control the economy, they could not stop the free market from flourishing. This was the message given by historian Frank Dikötter on 7 February during a lecture on the Cultural Revolution. He will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate on 8 February.

Many mosaic stones and potsherds have been excavated, and a Byzantine synagogue is revealing its history layer by layer. The excavations at Horvat Kur are a field school for a young generation of researchers.

At the conference of the Honours College Science & Society, students present TED Talks on a social issue of their interest. ‘It brings together everything they have learned in the past two and a half years.’

In her teaching and research, Mosquera primarily seeks the connection between tax law and other disciplines. Her appointment is effective as of 1 November 2021.

It's good to have high expectations of your students, says public administration lecturer Maarja Beerkens. ‘But I don't stand at the top of the mountain telling them to climb up.' This empathic and at the same time demanding lecturer has been nominated for the LUS Teaching Prize.

Within the ICM 2018 project, Leiden University cooperated with 25 partner universities from 14 countries. In total, 97 mobilities were granted to this project - 65 mobilities were realised (some mobilities had to be ended prematurely due to covid-19, others were finished online).

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy regularly publishes reviews of recent books within the field of diplomacy and global affairs.

Pastoralist Societies, Rock Art and Literacy in Jordan’s Black Desert (200 BC to 800 AD)

The team of WIIS-Netherlands exists out of the board members and the advisory council.

This year, NWO has awarded a Veni subsidy to 143 young researchers who have recently obtained their PhD. 17 of these researchers are at Leiden University and one works at the LUMC. The successful applicants will each receive 250,000 euro to develop their ideas and carry out research over a period of…

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