A healthy diet is always important, also when you’re working from home.

Radiation can be used to determine the isotope ratio of a skeleton. This provides information about where our ancestors lived and what they consumed. Dr Andrea Waters has developed a revolutionary method that can trace patterns of consumption from tens of thousands of years ago.

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.M. Brakefield, Prof.dr. B.J. Zwaan (Wageningen Universiteit)

We know this, but we don’t act on it: eat healthily, move more, address our stress levels and sleep well. Internist and Professor of Diabetology Hanno Pijl is fascinated by the effect that a healthy lifestyle can have on health. He researches how this lifestyle is achievable and satisfying, for patients…

The power of personalized nutrition lies in being able to conduct clinical research on healthy people while capturing metabolic markers sensitive to the impact of environmental and metabolic stressors (e.g. diet, changing sex hormones and the menstrual cycle).

The national dietary guidelines in Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, and Slovenia benefit nutrition, environment and animal welfare, Leiden environmental scientists write in the journal One Earth. However, the national guidelines of other countries face trade-offs, negatively impacting at…

What does it mean to eat healthily and responsibly? This question is gaining a new urgency now that in many countries undernourishment is being overtaken by diseases of affluence, such as obesity, and we are also becoming more aware of the environmental impact of our eating habits. It’s time to take…

PhD Defence

Do selenium nanoparticles in fish food cause subtle alterations in behavior of fish: effect of particles size and concentration?

Chemistry is all around us: from nutrition and smartphones to medicine. The field is developing rapidly, as the world population continues to grow and resources become scarce. MST will educate you on the basics of working towards a clean and healthy world.

Promotores: G. Persoon, R. Schefold

This project intends to provide the required knowledgebase for the design of novel mild intervention protocols to prevent fungal food spoilage.

PhD Defence

An important part of the SCS specialisation is the internship period. Students will get the opportunity to get to know the field and to apply what they have learned during the courses.

This project develops a scientific method to extract clinically relevant new information from patient forum websites that discuss patient experiences concerning e.g. medication, nutrition, co-morbidities, genetic factors etc.

Promotor: G.R. de Snoo, W. Kustiawan, Co-promotor: H.H. de Iongh

Can the venom of snakes, scorpions and other animals be sources of new antibiotics?

Bacteria in the teeth tell us a lot about nutrition and disease in our ancestors. It also tells us more about the immune system. This provides clues for treating modern diseases and allergies. For a long time archaeologists were irritated by tartar on the teeth of excavated skulls. They thought that…

The HARVEST project explores the dietary choices that our hominin ancestors and relatives made, by recovering information on what they consumed, and how factors like environmental variation, intrinsic biology, and development of food processing technologies could have influenced their decisions.

What are the global relationships between environmental conditions and abundance of distinct types of mycorrhizal fungi in soil and plant roots?

Bones contain information about people’s lives such as where they came from, their age at death and which diseases they suffered from. Researchers can deduce a lot from them about a person’s life and about human evolution. This generates leads that could help solve present-day problems, such as how…

Are traces of fire use detectable in ancient hominin genomes?

Which microorganisms live near and inside plant roots? How do they contribute to plant health? Can microorganisms be employed in plant protection?

Accumulation of metals in economy and environment and its associated risks, within the Netherlands and the EU.

How do different communities of residents in The Hague perceive and manage food waste in relation to citizenship (rights and responsibilities)?

As a new vision on food production, the feasibility study on LED light to grow crops with the biological- and chemical evaluation of final products.

The Leiden Index of Depression Sensitivity (LEIDS) measures cognitive reactivity (CR) to sadness, an aspect of cognitive vulnerability to depression, conceptually similar to rumination.

Leiden University and LUMC benefit from unique knowledge gained from research and teaching about healthy lifestyles. We want to bring this knowledge together into one place, and we want to share it even more effectively than we do now.

Issues such as climate change, the depletion of natural resources or social inequality are too complex to be addressed from a single scientific discipline or by a single country. Leiden University has the expertise to bring the resolution of these enormous problems a small step closer.

LUMC researchers are looking for factors that point to illness at an early stage.

LUMC researchers are looking for factors that point to illness at an early stage.

Evaluating the environmental consequences of diet changes in the European Union.

The way that traditional hunter-gatherers roasted tubers can shed new light on how people prepared food in prehistoric times. Archaeologist Stephanie Schnorr has studied the food preparation culture of the Hadza in Tanzania.

The research article ‘The life history of an enslaved African’ is one of the top 20 read Archaeometry articles in the period of January 2017 to December 2018.

The master’s programme Vitality and Ageing trains its students to become academic Vitality and Ageing professionals and engaged citizens who are competent and trained internationally and interdisciplinary. They are able to contribute to solutions for the challenges facing our ageing society.

In honour of Krijn Rietveld (1956 – 2018), Leiden University Fund and Royal DSM have created the Krijn Rietveld Memorial Innovation Award. This annual award was launched in 2020 and is organised to recognise and reward excellence in innovative research that contributes to a more sustainable world.

Fundamental research teaches us how our brain decides to eat one more sweet, instead of doing exercise. A public information campaign about healthy lifestyle has little impact on the decision, as Professor of General Psychology Bernard Hommel is aware. However, he does know what works. But the question…

Exponential population growth and rapid urbanisation are prompting the development of gigantic African metropolises that must be supplied with resources such as food, water and energy. This creates economic opportunities, drives migration and presents political challenges. Researchers from Leiden combine…

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

In this section you can find all the necessary information for you to be sustainble.

How can you stay fit during quarantine? The University Sports Centre may be closed, but online it's even more 'open' than usual.

Ekaterina Pannebakker has joined the section Private International Law as lecturer in September 2016. Ekaterina graduated in French law and Russian law (2004 and 2009, private law) and obtained a postgraduate LL.M. at Erasmus University Rotterdam (2011).

The environment also benefits when people follow national nutritional guidelines, Paul Behrens demonstrated in research published in PNAS. The publication attracted media attention both at home and internationally.

New research published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that these changes to the behavior of the immune system are persistent and can continue even after diet is improvedAlmost everyone knows that improving your eating habits will most likely improve your health. What most people may not…

A new study published in Archaeometry describes the unexpected results obtained from analyses of five human teeth discovered in a ritual cache at an enslaved African plantation site on the island of Saba in the Caribbean.

Join the Data4Food Challenge (11 - 13 September) and drive innovation to change the way we feed the world!