All comets might share their place of birth, new research says. For the first time ever, astronomer Christian Eistrup applied chemical models to fourteen well-known comets, surprisingly finding a clear pattern. His publication has been accepted in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

On 16 May 2022, Professor Michel Wouters from the Department of Biomedical Data Sciences at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), will deliver his inaugural lecture titled ‘Quality of Cancer Care: why the real world matters’. Wouters will use the opportunity to describe how quality registries…

On Tuesday December 19, Museum Boerhaave, the Lorentz Center and eLaw organize a public lecture on ‘Fairness and Accountability of Sociotechnical Algorithmic Systems’.

The immune system plays a paradoxical role in the spread of breast cancer. Some immune cells contribute to metastasis, while other cells can be activated to strengthen the effect of chemotherapy. Kelly Kersten made this discovery in her PhD research. PhD defence 7 February.

How do we incorporate and embed rules and principles that enter the private law system?

Prof. Ton Liefaard and dr. Stephanie Rap (together with Apollonia Bolscher LL.M.) are involved in developing a training Toolkit and Manual for the project Improving Juvenile Justice Systems in Europe: Training for Professionals (JUST/2013/FRC/AG).

Due to a major telephone disruption, 112 was unavailable for hours on Monday 24 June. At Albert Heijn, Tuesday 25 June, cash registers refused service. Bibi van den Berg, professor in Cyber Security Governance at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, looks back on aspects of the disasters of…

When stars are born, large clouds of gas and dust form that are known as circumstellar discs. Research by PhD candidate Francisca Concha-Ramírez shows that strong radiation from neighbouring stars soon evaporates the dust in these discs, which can prevent planet formation at an early stage. PhD defence…

Linguist Sara Petrollino has written the first detailed grammar of Hamar, a language spoken in south-west Ethiopia that has some unique characteristics. PhD defence 10 November.

Promotores: Prof.dr. J. Kuiper, Prof.dr. P.H.A. Quax

The rise of populist parties, the expansion of the role of the state and now the fragmentation of the Senate and the House of Representatives: Dutch political reality has changed rapidly over recent decades. These developments are in stark contrast to Dutch constitutional law that has remained almost…

Political scientist Ruud Koole (Institute Political Science, Leiden University) has been appointed to a state commission that will investigate whether the Dutch parliamentary system and the parliamentary democracy need to be reformed.

The Delivery of Biotherapeutics research group is led by Prof. Matthias Barz and focusses on the synthesis and characterization of polypept(o)ids and their application in nanomedicine to improve existing therapies or enable novel diagnostic or therapeutic approaches.

The database research community has made tremendous strides in developing powerful database engines that allow for efficient analytical query processing.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E. Deprettere

A group of chemists, that includes Sander van Kasteren and Hermen Overkleeft, has discovered that azides, a certain type of chemical compound, can determine whether or not T cells respond to or ignore a vaccine. Their discovery is set to be published in Angewandte Chemie.

NWO-ALW has funded the project Climate impact on human evolution: age calibration of the ICDP Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), led by PIs Cor Langereis and Guillaume Dupont-Nivet (Utrecht University).

Missiles that travel at approximately six thousand kilometres per hour, up to 5 or 6 times the speed of sound. Has Russia used those against Ukraine and how is that possible? In Leiden University’s Dutch video series ‘De Werkplaats’, Danny Pronk, political scientist, security expert, and researcher…

Should the media refer to a criminal’s ethnicity? Law students held an online afternoon symposium on discrimination in the criminal justice system – and, while they were at it, society at large.

Identifying the gaps in the legal framework for EU activities in the maritime security domain, and specifically in the areas of combating piracy, human smuggling or trafficking and drug trafficking.

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

Last Thursday the Dutch House of Representatives held a debate on children being put into care when the childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenaffaire) had caused problems for their families. Four Leiden University academics were asked by the House to produce a fact sheet for this debate, bringing together…

An international team led by Leiden astronomers has taken the first-ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets. The researchers used The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope for this, known as ESO’s VLT. Images of systems with multiple exoplanets are extremely…

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

The major aim is to determine the psychophysiological responses to stress and stress-management interventions and to examine the role of stress and stress-related psychophysiological mechanisms (e.g., cognitions, behaviors, and physiological stress responses) in both healthy and medical populations.

The project has been done in the Organization and Dynamic Chromatin group under the supervision of Prof. dr.ir. S.J.T. van Noort. The title of the presentation is: ''Structural changes induced by variation of linker DNA length.

Promotor: Ed F. Deprettere, Co-promotor: Todor P. Stefanov

Promotor: W.Th.F. den Hollander, Co-promotor: F.R. Nardi

The student loan system, implemented in 2015 in part to improve the quality of Dutch education, is facing political backlash. Despite having signed the student loan system agreement in 2015, both GroenLinks and PvdA have had a change of heart.

Source: Biochem Pharmacol, Volume 95, Issue 4, pp. 290-300 (2015)

Rogier Creemers, assistent professor in Modern Chinese Studies, wrote an article about China's social credit system in the Schweizer Monat. In the article he argues that it is not the most dangerous among China's technology projects.

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.

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.

This project is situated within the context of an innovation of the biology curriculum in Dutch secondary schools. The main purposes are (1) to clarify the relation between teachers’ practical knowledge and the decisions they make when planning and implementing their lessons and (2) to develop a professional…

NWO awarded a grant for novel research on Complex and Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The grant will fund a four-year research project in which they hope to devise a method to explore and find optimal designs for CPS. Todor Stefanov, Associate Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced…

During the colloquium ‘Minorities and the Criminal Justice System’, Jasmina Mačkić (lecturer at the Europa Institute) presented some of the research results from her PhD thesis ‘Proving Discriminatory Violence at the European Court of Human Rights’.

Leiden University, together with Utrecht University and Radboud University in Nijmegen, has received a research grant from the Covid-19 programme of ZonMw, the Dutch organisation for research into health care.

The life cycle of comets near the star Beta Pictoris is similar to that of comets in our own solar system. This is the conclusion of a team of astronomers from the Netherlands, France and Brazil. It seems that, just like in our own solar system, there are fewer comets as the star gets older. The researchers,…