In breast cancer, metastasis rather than the primary tumour is the cause of death. A lack of oxygen in the tumour cells promotes this metastasis, accompanied by a reprogramming of the cell's metabolism. PhD candidate Qiuyu Liu investigated these alterations to get more knowledge about the actionable…

On Friday 10 July the Towards Biosolar Cells research programme was granted a budget of 25 million euros by the Dutch Government. The Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality recommended the programme because it will contribute to green energy, improve food supplies and a create a more sustainable…

On an apparently normal cube a pattern of hollows and bulges appears when the cube is compressed. A method has been developed to design such three-dimensional structures and to construct these using simple building blocks. Publication in Nature.

Nanoparticles that transport medicines to a specific part of the human body are usually broken down in the liver prematurely. Jeroen Bussmann from Leiden University has discovered a new method to prevent this from happening. Publication in ACS Nano.

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

How can a single origami crease pattern be folded into two precisely defined target shapes? Researchers at AMOLF and Leiden University have created an ‘alphabet’ of 140 origami ‘puzzle pieces’ that allows them to do just that, as described today in Nature Physics. This discovery could help in the construction…

On Thursday 9 November, Leiden University organized its annual Physics Ladies Day for female high school students. To mark this festive day, we put the spotlight on two female researchers, who talk about their experiences in physics.

Through an NWO grant, chemist Rik Mom has received a tenure track position at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, where he obtained his PhD cum laude in 2017. Mom will study the storage of sustainable energy by means of splitting water. Using new methods, he will investigate on an atomic scale which…

The Netherlands organisation for Scientific Research NWO has granted a subsidy to prof. dr Wilfred H. van Soldt (Humanities, LIAS) and dr Diederik J.W. Meijer (Archaeology, Near East) to conduct a pilot excavation in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The widely used pesticide thiacloprid can cause a large-scale decline in freshwater insects. This was discovered by researchers from the Living Lab in Leiden. For three months they counted the flying insects in the 36 ditches of the lab. Their research appeared in PNAS.

ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.

Light reflects from a mirror, but where exactly does this reflection happen? Well, it depends, Martin van Exter and Corné Koks discovered. Their precise calculations, published in Optics Express, are important for designing optical cavities for quantum communication.

It is late June, and on a windy meadow north of Leiden known as the Vrouw Vennepolder a group of archaeology students just hit the last ice age. Considering this involves manually pushing a ground core to a depth of 10 meters, this is no small feat. Even so, the taking of ground samples in this, at…

Nanomaterials can pass much further along the food chain than was previously thought. The particles can change shape and size in each organism, enabling them to pass on to the next one in the chain. Researchers from the Institute of Environmental Sciences discovered this accidentally when using a novel…

PhD student Esmee Koedoot studied the underlying processes responsible for metastases in a dangerous type of breast cancer. She hopes to find new possibilities to fight the disease. In December 2019 she obtained her doctorate cum laude.

The European Union has awarded a COFUND grant to a consortium of researchers from the universities of Groningen, Leiden and Eindhoven for a collective fellowship programme called ‘oLife’. The 6 M€ programme, which is co-financed by the participating universities, will recruit and train 18 post-doctoral…

Carola Hein, Professor of History of Architecture and Urban Planning TU Delft, has been affiliated with the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University since January 2022 as Professor Water, Ports, and Historic Cities. On the surface this may seem a strange combination,…

Many astronomers suspect that most of the matter in the universe is invisible. So how can you weigh dark matter if you can't actually see it? Professor Henk Hoekstra is looking for a solution. Inaugural lecture 25 June.

The idea that prejudices about the (Middle)-East came to be during the colonisation of North-Africa in the 19th century is false. Mounir el-Badri wrote a cum laude bachelor thesis about orientalist judgments with which 18th century slaves in Morocco much earlier characterised their captors with.

Fleur Visser was awarded a Veni grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She is one of seventeen promising young Leiden scientists, who get the opportunity to develop their own ideas over a period of three years. Veni-funding is part of NWO's Talent Scheme, concerning…

Jan Zaanen, Professor in Theoretical Physics of condensed material, has been awarded a Spinoza prize. His pioneering ideas about the collective behaviour of quantum particles and high temperature superconductivity have often given him the reputation of being something of a rebel.

Lecture, Kaiser Lente Lezing

Van der Waals colloquium

Conference

Lecture

Lecture, Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series

Lecture, Archaeological Forum

Lecture

Vice-Rector Simone Buitendijk doesn’t believe for a single moment that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are just hype. This is what she said on 13 March at Campus the Hague’s InspirationLab on ‘Open Education’. Buitendijk wants Leiden University to be at the leading edge. ‘MOOCs and online innovation…

Several years ago, two amateur archaeologists from Brabant discovered over a hundred Roman coins near to Berlicum in the north of the province. After years of research, it now appears that the location, close to a ford in the river, was a site for offerings. Another interesting fact is that the coins…

Alireza Mashaghi from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) will use state-of-the-art technology to investigate proteins that play a role in muscular dystrophy. His goal is to provide new insights for designing novel therapeutic strategies in the future. To accomplish this, Mashaghi receives…

Amidst the lathes and welding machines of the Fine Mechanics Department, Emiel Wiegers is working concentratedly on a metal cylinder. He and his colleagues design and construct components for researchers' set-ups. ‘We are a bunch of inventors who enjoy helping the researchers in our Faculty.’

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.

Leiden based chemistry student and chess grandmaster proposes molecular system for development of artificial leaf

Many traces of the city's slavery history can be found in Leiden but the public isn't always aware of them. The initiators of 'Mapping Slavery in Leiden' want to change this with guided tours and street markers. Representatives of the University and other Leiden institutions will be giving the first…

A new study on the province level material footprint of China underscores the need to improve resource efficiency in the country, which would be crucial for moving to a circular economy. The research carried out by researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and Leiden University was published…

The research group headed by Leiden chemist Marc Koper has discovered a catalyst that minimizes the production of chlorine gas during salt water electrolysis. The invention can enable the direct production of hydrogen from seawater. The article has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical…

Light makes us flourish – in this respect we humans are just like a rose or an azalea. Light can also be used to treat people who are ill. In Leiden, Sylvestre Bonnet and Esther Habers are working – each in their own discipline – on new applications of light in a clinical context.

Researchers at Leiden University and TU Delft have combined two techniques that are used to measure the structure of biomolecules, creating a method that is ten times more sensitive.

How big is the universe? How do stars form and evolve? And does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? These main questions in astronomy are the themes of the new exhibition Above & Beyond, which was created in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The exhibition…

In the late colonial Netherlands Indies, starting from 1892, homes were set up for the re-education of children. At first by private individuals, later by the government. Much later still, privately funded institutions existed alongside government-funded ones. Annelieke Dirks’ defence on 23 June 201…

Globalisation means becoming globalised, a process in which material culture plays a crucial role. This is what Miguel John Versluys, the new Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology, teaches. He bases his teaching on research into the origin and growth of the Roman Empire from the 3rd…

The Grotius Centre Working Paper Series is an occasional series through which researchers in the Grotius Centre can publish the unedited versions of manuscripts that have been accepted for publication by journals and books.

PhD defence

Lecture

Festival

Lecture

Lecture