This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

Synthetic fuel is cleaner than natural oil, but its production process needs to be more efficient. Now for the first time, physicists have directly observed the molecules produced in the chemical process. This paves the way for designing more efficient catalysts. Publication on September 19th in Nature…

Archaeologists and students from Leiden University and local volunteers have found a Roman camp in the woods near Ermelo. The camp is four kilometres away from another Roman fortification discovered some time ago. This confirms the idea that the Romans would also often explore beyond the boundaries…

Leiden University is currently working on the new Gorlaeus Building, a sustainable modern building for the Faculty of Science. To make room for the phase 2A construction work, a plane tree of over 20 metres in height was moved on 17 December. The tree has been conserved. Its new home will be on the…

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Eurogroup, will deliver the Europa Lecture on 17 January 2018 in the Academy Building at Leiden University.

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.'

Archaeologists from Leiden University find what is clearly an earth wall and ditch structure in the woods near Ermelo. They suspect it may be the remains of a Roman military camp, but as yet have no conclusive evidence. Will they be able to solve the puzzle?

Leiden University College The Hague celebrates a milestone by seeing its 1000th graduate receive their diploma.

Associate Professor of Physical Geography Paul Hudson at Leiden University College was interviewed by TIME Magazine on the Mississippi floods that have been harassing the United States this year.

The proportion of children who are overweight has increased enormously over the past 20 years. The number has currently stabilised but even so there are still too many overweight and obese children. Could there be some connection with the way they are brought up? Roxanna Camfferman's PhD research shows…

Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker expressed his support in the media for 'The Real Opening,' the protest against government cuts. 'The plans are a disaster for higher education.' Professor Remco Breuker, one of the organisers of this protest on 2 September, called in NRC Handelsblad for a stop to the…

Leiden University can build an alternative Humanities Campus on its own available land at the current location in the city. This is the conclusion of a feasibility study and is what the mayor and aldermen of Leiden write in a letter to the city council.

The surface of platinum electrodes changes much more during use than was previously thought. In a collaboration between the Leiden Institutes of Chemistry and Physics, chemists Leon Jacobse, Yi-Fan Huang and Marc Koper, and physicist Marcel Rost have been able to show this for the first time. Publication…

The new Erfgoed Gezocht/Heritage Quest website means you can play armchair detective and hunt for undiscovered burial mounds in the Veluwe. This will help stop them being destroyed by construction projects. The website is the initiative of the Leiden University Faculty of Archaeology in collaboration…

Scientific research, heritage management and public outreach intertwined.

Archaeologist Victor Klinkenberg examined an old Assyrian settlement in Syria, near to the IS stronghold Raqqa. 'Social life was more important than military life.' PhD defence 27 October.

On Tuesday 10 September 2019, the opening of the Master European Law took place in the Old Observatory. Ms Catherine De Bolle, Europol Executive Directeur, presented the opening lecture.

Density functional theory (DFT) with so-called semi-local exchange has been remarkable accurate for some dissociative chemisorption reactions on metals, but it has notoriously failed for others. A team of researchers from the University of California at Irvine and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry have…

The third and final participation session was held on 20 September; the evening was attended by local residents, business owners, students and other stakeholders.

One of them turned out to be two thousand years old. And older giant barrel sponges appear to have a faster rate of cell division, unlike us. They produce antibiotics and much, much more. Lina Bayona Maldonado studied how the differences in such factors as age or oceanic depth affect the production…

Take a walk through any city, and you are likely to come across a brightly coloured mural. Although these paintings often seem to serve solely as a backdrop for Instagram snapshots, art history professor Minna Valjakka says there are rich traditions and intricate histories that uncover more critical…

SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research is moving. In 2021, the Utrecht branch will settle in South-Holland. Pieter Dieleman is group leader at SRON. He tells why the upcoming move is such a good idea: ‘SRON is a connecting factor between Delft and Leiden.’

Peter Akkermans, Professor of Archaeology of the Middle East, cannot say for certain how much damage the destruction by IS has caused in Palmyra.

Paleobotanist Menno Booi discovered that 250 previously described fossil tree species are objectively not distinguishable; they belong to only one single species.

To what extent did the Netherlands grow rich from the Transatlantic slave trade? In his dissertation 'Walcherse Ketens', Gerhard de Kok looks at Vlissingen and Middelburg, the most important slave trade cities in the Netherlands during the second half of the 18th century. It turns out that, although…

Early December, lecturer Joris Timmermans gave the first virtual reality lecture at the Institute of Environmental Sciences. Together with the Centre for Innovation, he developed an innovative teaching method for the master's course Methods in Biodiversity Analysis. The first results look promising.…

For the third year in a row, the bonfires in the Duindorp and Scheveningen neighbourhoods in The Hague during New Year's Eve have been cancelled. According to Professor Henk te Velde, the fight for the bonfires represents something bigger: angry citizens.

Cornelia Pabst is a PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory, whose research is based around primary data taken by instruments onboard SOFIA, an airplane-based observatory on which she has flown multiple times. Pabst explains how this airplane has impacted her research career and gives her views on the ever-present…

How much energy and greenhouse gas emissions can Dutch homes save? Xining Yang uses Leiden as an example and shows with his research how enormous the impact can be. At least, if we work harder on becoming more sustainable. Based on the models he developed, Yang will receive his doctorate on 28 June.

What happens if you are an academic forced to flee your home country and find yourself here in the Netherlands with practically nothing? The Hestia scheme offered by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) gives refugee scientists the opportunity to resume their academic career in the Netherlands. The scheme…

The lyrical documentary about Leiden by American anthropologist Mark Neupert has become a hit. Leiden anthropologist Janine Prins taught Neupert the finer points of the subject in the course on Visual Methods offered by Anthropology. What does she think of Neupert's observation? ‘He's gone completely…

Elephants ranged over Schöningen in Lower Saxony 300,000 years ago. In recent years, remains of at least ten elephants have been found at the Palaeolithic sites situated on the edges of the former opencast lignite mine. Now, a collaboration of archaeologists from University of Tübingen and the Lower…

What are the origins of the Islamic Empire? And what was daily life like there? Two new Ted Ed animations answer these questions in simple language. Arabists Petra Sijpesteijn and Birte Kristiansen explain what the process of developing the videos was like.

Leiden archaeologists appealed for help from volunteers to search for archaeological remains on satellite images of Utrechtse Heuvelrug, a national park close to Utrecht. The outbreak of the corona virus made the project a resounding success: in a single month, all 300,971 maps had been examined. 'That's…

Professor Lodewijk Woltjer passed away on 25 August 2019.

Towards the end of February, three Leiden University buildings will be assessed for their accessibility to people with a disability. The assessment will be carried out by Ongehinderd, a social enterprise committed to making the Netherlands more accessible. Its founder and director, Gerard de Nooij,…

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…

The scientific interest in stone sculpture has been present in the archaeological investigation of Nicaragua from the mid 19th century onward.

The Seasons of Interdisciplinarity are an initiative by the Young Academy Leiden that started in 2021.

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

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Computers are increasingly able to accomplish tasks that are difficult for human experts, such as diagnosing diseases or detecting credit card fraud. While the earliest examples of computational thinking can be traced back to the 13th century, according to Holger Hoos, Leiden Professor of Machine Learning,…

Dr. Josien de Klerk, Associate professor in Global Public Health at Leiden University College The Hague recently published some of her work on HIV/AIDS. In collaboration with a team of interdisciplinary researchers from the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development she came to the conclusion…

We are delighted that our annual "Science to Experience" exhibition will again take place, hosted by the V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media. Students were challenged to communicate their own science-inspired statements as experiences within the exhibition, this year along the theme "MUTATE".

Inclusive teaching and research, a good reflection of society and a safe and accessible learning and working environment. The new Diversity and Inclusion Work Plan has set the direction of University policy and aims to create a university where everyone feels respected and at home. Diversity Officer…

Confetti cannons announced the opening of HUBspot, the new venue for innovation and entrepreneurship at the Langegracht in Leiden, on 31 October. But all attention was on the young student entrepreneurs who presented their businesses.

Jurist Gineke Wiggers wants to predict the expected impact of legal articles. Carel Stolker, Rector of the University and, like Wiggers, a legal specialist, is enthusiastic about the research. ‘A big data project like this will help us establish the effect of our work on society.’

Of the 32 historic buildings that are opening their doors to the public on the Open Monument Days on 8 and 9 September, five are University buildings. The Hortus Botanicus is also open.