They are often referred to as ‘The Oscars of the Natural Sciences’: the Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. This year, the prize for physics went to the Event Horizon Telescope team, which took the first-ever picture of a black hole. Four Leiden astronomers were…

Computer scientists from Leiden University and the University of Münster describe a new theoretical starting point for approaching difficult optimization problems. They can take into account several criteria simultaneously, instead of just one at a time.

Neuroscientist Anne Urai has been awarded a Veni subsidy to further develop her ideas over the coming four years on how the brain makes choices. Why did she receive the award? Urai answers five questions about her Veni grant for young researchers.

‘It has never been so easy to set up a Studium Generale series.’ With these words Tilman Grünewald thanked speaker Frank den Hollander, who kicked off the Studium Generale series on complex networks on Monday 20 February.

Conference, Carte Blanche

Robot technology is flourishing in multiple sectors of society, from retail, health care, industry and education. However, are robots representative towards minority groups of society, like LGBTQ+ people?

Lecture

Conference

Leiden University offers students the opportunity to follow online courses that award study credits, thus avoiding the necessity of travelling abroad.

PhD Defence

Lecture

Staff and student mobility, a cooperative education programme and the possibility of a joint research center in artificial intelligence and data science. A delegation from Chinese partner XJTU paid a fruitful visit to the Faculty of Science in the last week of October.

Governance and Global Affairs

Mathematician Stéphanie van der Pas and psychologist Sandy Overgaauw have been nominated for the New Scientist science talent competition, a prize for the most talented scientist in the Netherlands and Flanders.

Joost Kok, Professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Science, has been appointed Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente. He will succeed Prof. Peter Apers, and start at 1 February 2018.

Professor of Predictive Pharmacology Elizabeth de Lange has received an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Pharmacy of Uppsala University. She will be honoured during the Uppsala Winter Conferment Ceremony on 31 January 2020.

Of the 150 elected representatives, 24 studied or conducted their PhD research in Leiden. Who are they and which degrees are most popular among these MPs?

Six master students of the Computer Science programme will present their papers on future cities at the NetMob conference in Oxford. The six papers were part of the international Future Cities Challenge and made it to the top 10 of all entries.

Leiden Professor of Number Theory Manjul Bhargava has been awarded a Fields Medal, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize for Maths. Bhargava is a professor in Princeton, and since 2010 has also been the holder of the Stieltjes chair in Leiden.

Leiden physicists found a surprising interaction between electrons and a resist layer. The resist appears to charge and discharge due to incoming electrons. Publication in Physical Review Letters.

After a succesful first lecture, the Leiden physics institute LION is launching an online series of (Dutch language) lectures about physics, intended for a broad audience, named the Tatiana Afanassjewa lectures. Upcoming speakers are science historian Dirk van Delft, neutrino physicist Dorothea Samtleben…

The DASPO-group for data analysis and survival in personalized sarcoma at the Mathematical Institute has developed an app that provides personalised predictions for patients suffering from soft tissue sarcomas. Due to the aggressive nature of such tumors, the prognosis for such patients is poor, even…

Governance and Global Affairs

In September 2016, the educational programme Universe Awareness (UNAWE) implemented a series of educational activities at Basisschool De Verrekijker, a primary school for refugee children in Katwijk, the Netherlands.

Many of our staff and students have won prizes over the past year. Others have been awarded a subsidy, or, because of their eminence in their field, they have been appointed member of an academic society or have taken on a position in the community. Reasons enough to be proud of them and to include…

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2020, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

The Cyber Security lecturers are scholars and lecturers of Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

On 26 June 2016 the Council of the Academia Europaea approved a class lists of scholars to be invited to accept membership at the Academia Europaea. Professor Lisa Cheng was elected for the section “Linguistic Studies”.

A The Hague-based project is aiming to tackle teacher shortage and socioeconomic inequality reflected in primary education – and the objective is to do so while helping schools face the challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Higher education students are joining hands with primary…

The European ARTificial Intelligence Lab is now offering artists working with Artificial Intelligence the chance for a residency at the Leiden Observatory and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. Entries are possible until 22 July 2020

Jiska Ogier studied notarial law, which wasn’t always easy because she went to lectures in a wheelchair. As a student she pushed to make society accessible. And with her law degree and lived experience she has now made this her work. ‘You can achieve a lot with creative solutions.’

Young people often have many and varied interests. In three projects at ICLON of Leiden University, researchers examine which interests young people have. How do these interests change over time and what role do they play in their choice of school subjects, the transition from secondary to higher education…

Humanities, Centre for Linguistics

Science, Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL)

Science, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), LACDR PhD Portal

Misinformation spreads easily and fast. It gets presented as news, whereas actual news gets dismissed as fake. Conflicting streams of information allows all sides to cherry-pick whatever is most comfortable, boosting degrees of confidence and confusing the deliberation of both politicians and voters.…

Science, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), LACDR PhD Portal

The application procedure is broken down into three parts.

Science

Science, Leiden Institute of Physics (LION)

The application procedure consists of three steps.

Science, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR)

The application procedure is broken down into three parts.

The application procedure is broken down into three parts.

Computers are slowly turning human. No, not literally. We will not have to bow down to our silicon overlords anytime soon. They are, however, starting to ‘learn’ the same way we do ourselves. With the advent of superfast quantum computers, this development is gaining momentum. Vedran Dunjko develops…

Science, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR)

Science, Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML)

Science, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR)

How can we organise society so as to keep our planet habitable for us and for all other life forms around us? To answer this question, Leiden researchers collaborate across disciplines, from biology to data science, and from environmental economy to archaeology.