What will happen if the lights in a large part of the city are switched off? How many stars can you see without all that light pollution? This is what researchers, artists and the residents of Leiden are going to investigate during Seeing Stars Leiden on 25 September. ‘Leiden is the ideal place for…

The 2023 Digital Humanities Pilot Project Symposium and Digital Winter School recently took place, Jan 30 – Feb 2.

Donororganen zijn er nooit genoeg. De organen die wel beschikbaar zijn, moeten vliegensvlug getransplanteerd worden. De geneeskunde zet daarom volop in op het langer goedhouden van organen. Marlon de Haan (24) onderzoekt hoe je nieren buiten het lichaam in leven kunt houden.

In Dutch TV programme Early Birds, Marvin and Kevin Groen (26) showed viewers areas of nature in the city that often go unnoticed. These good-natured brothers - twins, in fact - were a big hit with the viewers. How much influence do they have on one another's studies and work?

Antibiotic resistance is a common problem among patients. The European Project TIPAT trains pharmacologists, microbiologists and immunologists of six universities in interdisciplinary thinking. The ultimate goal is to develop better treatment guidelines to combat resistance. Coen van Hasselt of the…

The better you mirror each other's behavior, the better you appear to work together. In her PhD research at the unit Cognitive Psychology in Leiden, Friederike Behrens has developed a measure to capture the dynamic process of mirroring in numbers. PhD defense on 28 October.

From interview training and competence tests to internships and contact with alumni. At Leiden University there are many ways for our students to prepare for the job market, but the support available is often too fragmented and hard to find. How can we best prepare our students for a job market that…

The Centre for Digital Scholarship of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities would like to invite you to the symposium on Tools Criticism on Thursday 21 November, from 10.00-18.00. The symposium will be held in the Vossius room of the University Library at Witte…

Students who also want to develop their artistic talents can take a year-long art class – Practicum Artium – at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. ‘I can express my creativity and am learning to approach subjects in a visual way.’

Plants can’t run away from enemies. Still, it would like to keep life-threatening herbivores at a distance. This can be done with odours. Klaas Vrieling of the Institute of Biology Leiden found out with his team how plants change odour production to keep the munchers at a distance.

'You’ll know right away when you meet your true love’ or ‘Opposites attract’: Some persistent beliefs exist about love and attraction, but are they true? Researcher Iliana Samara investigates the dynamics of attraction and explains which love myths we can let go of.

The Capacity to Innovate is a recently published book by Sarah Giest, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. In this article Sarah gives insight in the main findings of the book and the experience developing it.

The Netherlands and Morocco: relations between the two countries go back a long way. Assistant professor Nadia Bouras is researching these relations. Of Moroccan migrant workers, she says, 'In the seventies the predominant idea was that everyone had the right to their own culture and religion. That's…

On Friday 30 November 2018 more than 70 students became acquainted with the large range of companies that Leiden Bio Science Park has to offer. In addition to the companies with eye-catching façade names along the cycling route to the faculty, like CHDR, BaseClear and Astellas, there is much more to…

The Leiden University College (LUC) education team behind The Learning Mindset (TLM) has received 800,000 euro’s during the Dutch Higher Education Award Ceremony 2022. The LUC team was second behind Universteit Twente. The prize was awarded during the annual Comenius Festival of the Comenius Network.…

‘Walking around in a new environment activates our brain’s learning centre. This allows us to learn better, even once we’ve returned to a familiar environment.’ This is the conclusion drawn by neuroscientist Judith Schomaker in her recent publication in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

During the Faculty of Science New Year's reception, Daniël Rozen was named Discoverer of the year 2015. Nienke van der Marel and Koen van der Maaden both won the prize for the best dissertation and Jeroen van Smeden was named Best Teacher of 2015.

Turning beer waste into a useful, sustainable product. That was the mission of students from Leiden at the international BISC-E event. The biology students challenged themselves and won third place in the Dutch finals of this competition. For this, they used the simple formula: Grain + fungus = coas…

Leiden University has become more sustainable in the past few years, but it could do better, particularly in the area of teaching and research. A student and staff workgroup is preparing a new Sustainability Vision 2030. Programme Manager Daphne van den Berg explains how this is taking shape and where…

Rob Zwijnenberg, Professor of Art and Science Interactions, uses daring experiments to get his students to think about social issues.

For the first time more than half century, one of oldest telescopes at Leiden Observatory is getting a major improvement.

From a white leather armchair, on which Barack Obama once sat, Dean Michiel Kreutzer opened the academic year. This time not with visitors, but completely corona-proof via a live stream. In a homely setting, Kreutzer spoke with several guests, including Covid-19 researcher Thomas Hankemeier and brand…

For Harry Flore, chair of the LBSP business asociation and CEO at Hal Allergy, the Leiden Bio Science Park (LBSP) has no secrets. But he can well imagine the park is a black box for some staff and students at the university: 'I welcome collaboration on all fronts.'

People appear to release their feelings of anxiety more quickly when the vagus nerve in the brain is stimulated with a device in the ear. In his doctoral research at Clinical Psychology, Andreas Burger examined new possibilities for treating symptoms of anxiety. PhD defence on 15 May.

Leiden astronomer Xander Tielens has been awarded a Spinoza prize, the highest scientific prize in the Netherlands. Tielens is Professor in the Physics and Chemistry of Interstellar Space. He studies large and complex, often organic, molecules found in interstellar space. The Spinoza prize carries a…

Marieke Adriaanse is Professor of Behavioural Interventions in Population Health and researches behavioural science issues in health. She advocates for better interdisciplinary collaboration and a new form of recognition and rewards within academia. ‘We have to stop being so blinkered,’ she says in…

A team of researchers from Young Academy and the Huygens ING/NL Lab has brought a three-century-old fragrance to life based on a recipe by Constantijn Huygens. The fragrance makes the past more tangible and can help people experience history differently.

For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, women students and researchers from physics talk about what inspires them about their work. From quantum to cosmology and biophysics, their curiosity about how nature works is what connects these women. What do these 5 scientists want to share…

There is certainly some variation in terms of pupils’ performance and motivation. This is evident from the GUTS teaching innovation project conducted by education specialist Lindy Wijsman in the first three classes at a secondary school in Rotterdam. In the first three years, the level of pupils’ performance…

Patients with the same illness often receive the same treatment, even if the cause of the illness is different for each person. This represents a new step towards ultimately being able to offer every patient more personalised treatment.

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.

On 15 May, the ambassadors of 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries were shown the highlights of research at Leiden University Faculty of Science. Furthermore, Prince Carlos de Bourbon de Parme awarded prizes to two young academics who conduct research in Latin America.

Happy students and proud families, friends and lecturers; on 13 July the first fifteen refugee students graduated from the Preparatory Year for teaching in Leiden. They started a programme in September at a Dutch university of applied sciences or an academic university. 'This is just the start!'

Want to explore a different specialist field? Or maybe study a topic from your programme in more depth? This summer Leiden University is again offering a broad selection of Summer Schools.

The sand on European beaches may look pristine, but in every kilogram of sand there are on average 250 microplastics: fragments smaller than 5mm. These results are part of a study from Leiden researchers with the help of beach-goers throughout Europe.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Beenakker has been awarded a €2m Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). He will use this to try to create the ideal building blocks for a quantum computer: ‘braided’ Majorana fermions. An ambitious project that may just lead to a major breakthrough.

Positive expectations about a medicine may help it to work more effectively, even if you tell patients about this placebo effect. The reverse, the nocebo effect, works in the same way. Health psychologist Stefanie Meeuwis found evidence for this in various studies. PhD defence 3 June.

What does the University mean for The Hague? And what are researchers and students learning from the city and its residents? The Hague city councillors visited Campus The Hague on 27 September and spoke to administrators and researchers. ‘From Schilderswijk to Benoordenhout: we are a university for…

For the first time ever, Leiden biologists have found that the ‘nose’ of spirochetes – worm-shaped bacteria – have a two-fold symmetry. A remarkable discovery, as the ‘nose’ of every other bacterium has been found to have a six-fold symmetry. First author Alise Muok wrote a popular blog about the findings…

In 2018, the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), born out of activism, exists for forty years. The institute celebrated this on 28 June in the Stadsgehoorzaal in Leiden. In the morning, proud directors and researchers looked back and forth. After this several experts discussed the current environmental…

With Sylvestre Bonnet, Jeroen Codée and Remus Dame, the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC) will be getting no less than three new professors. Bonnet will become professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry, Codée professor in Organic Chemistry and Dame professor in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry.

In FameLab contestants explain their research to the public in a three-minute presentation – without using PowerPoint or other presentation tools. The Leiden heats of this international communications competition will be held on 7 March. Anyone is welcome to come and watch!

Leiden astronomers and ecologists are developing an instrument that lets people measure the quality of surface water with a smartphone.This international citizen science project, MONOCLE, is a collaboration between scientists and local people in Tanzania, Brazil and four European countries.

Researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have successfully used stem cell gene therapy to treat a baby with the severe congenital immune disorder SCID. An important milestone: it is the first time stem cell gene therapy of Dutch origin has been administered to a patient, and also…

A large interdisciplinary NWO research project attempted to discover the cognitive origin of the human ability to learn linguistic rules. This is not so simple, according to linguist Andreea Geambaşu and her colleagues. PhD defence on 11 December.

Liposomes – nano-sized spheres composed of fatty molecules – are very promising for vaccination. Bio-pharmaceutical scientist Naomi Benne discovered that the immune response in animal models can be steered by varying the charge of the liposomes. She obtained her PhD degree on 8 September for this research,…

Leiden University is involved in five new NWO Gravitation projects. Two relate to mental disorder and the remaining three to a healthy lifestyle, the combination of human and artificial intelligence, and the special relationship between plants and microbes.

The endogenous compound anandamide – often referred to as the body’s own marijuana – plays a role in erasing memories of a traumatic event. This was discovered by an international team led by Leiden chemist Mario van der Stelt. The results have been published in Nature Chemical Biology and may provide…

A jar, filled with water, that functions as an aquarium for fishes while plants or flowers grow on top. Urban Crops, a young start-up company, creates small eco-systems in jars by using aquaponic systems. The 'Ecojar' is a modern decoration in living-rooms and office spaces, but also purifies the air…

Leiden researchers found a way to measure the tiny forces exerted by pericytes, one of the most elusive, hard to research cell types, which occur in tiny blood vessels. Building on this fundamental science, researchers may eventually find treatments for medical conditions like ischaemia.