To be able to identify, slow down and reverse functional deterioration in the elderly to give them more years of good health.

PhD Defence

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Zaanen, A. Parnachev

Promotor: E. Gittenberger, Co-promotor: B.W. Hoeksema

Dave R. Stikkolorum, Michel R.V. Chaudron, Oswald de Bruin won the Best Paper Award of the Model Gamification Contest at the ACM/IEEE Models 2012 Conference for their paper: The Art Of Software Design, a Video Game for Learning Design Principles.

Can we establish a new quality control system for herbal medicines that is based on bioactivity rather than a few abundant chemicals?

The Quantitative Clinical Pharmacology group is led by Prof. Dr. Catherijne Knibbe. Her research group aims to define how to adjust a drug dose in special patient populations such as (prematurely born) neonates or children, obese individuals or critically ill patients. Through combining the statistical…

Cosmologists have many possible models for the Universe, of which only one can be true. A new flowchart will eliminate some of them when two specific Universe features are accurately measured. Publication in Physical Review D on 7 November.

The second instalment of the Humanities Lab - the three-year honours programme of the Humanities – has reached its conclusion. On 12 May, 11 groups of honours student presented their work in the Arsenaal building.

Within the space of a few months, the Heritage Quest citizen science project, whereby volunteers scan elevation maps of the Veluwe area for burial mounds and other prehistoric remains, has already led to groundbreaking new insights. Hundreds of burial mounds have been found, as have a huge number of…

As a PhD candidate, you are expected to follow certain courses and training programmes in the context of your training as a researcher. The courses and training programmes will help you conduct your research, write your dissertation, develop your career, and gain self-insight. The LACDR PhD training…

The financial system needs complexity theory to predict economic crises like the 2008 meltdown. An international team of scientists, including Leiden physicist Diego Garlaschelli, state this in a paper published in Science on February 19th.

Professor Carlo Beenakker has been awarded a FOM Projectruimte subsidy to build a theoretical model of a majorana gun, a very promising instrument for quantum computers.

What is involved in setting up and carrying out clinical research? To give researchers a helping hand, LUMC Campus The Hague has brought together tips and tricks in the new massive open online course (MOOC) Population Health: Study Design.

What determines healthy behavior and how do you promote healthy choices and routines? These are a few questions currently being addressed by Marieke Adriaanse, recently appointed Professor of Behavioral Intervention in Population Health Management at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC).

Key publications of the Systems Pharmacology group

The main methodological aspects of the use of stepwise LCA estimators under different circumstances.

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

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.

Experts from several disciplines have raised concerns about the use of seemingly precise models to guide policies in matters as complex as the current Covid-19 pandemic. 22 scholars wrote down five principles on how to responsibly use scientific models. This comment was published in Nature on 24 June…

Promotor: Prof.dr. B. van de Water, Co-promotor: E.H.J. Danen

David van Bodegom, Professor of Vitality in an Ageing Population, will give his inaugural lecture on 11 November, also titled Vitality in an Ageing Population. According to Van Bodegom the key to healthy ageing is the lived environment. In the fight against lifestyle-related conditions, he therefore…

Promotor: Prof.dr. R.M.H. Merks

Populist opposition parties are less likely to engage in policy-making behaviour (participating in or directly influencing legislative production) and somewhat more likely to engage in scrutiny behaviour (monitoring and criticising government actions).

A full overview of all loans and debts between banks would help preventing a new financial collapse. But banks do not provide this information. An econophysics model by Diego Garlaschelli and collaborators reconstructs the most probable situation and finishes first place in two independent tests.

An interdisciplinary consortium consisting of Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Statistics Netherlands (CBS), receives €1 million to build an open digital infrastructure for network analysis of the entire Dutch population. This will allow scholars and policymakers to gain crucial…

By making smart use of available data, the health and care of people can be substantially improved. Marco Spruit wants to use language and machine learning in the coming years to identify and solve the biggest care issues in the region of The Hague. He has been appointed Professor of Advanced Data Science…

The precolonial inhabitants of the Caribbean islands communicated, travelled, and exchanged objects and ideas along an expansive inter-island network. New methods of computer modeling shed light on these networks. Emma Slayton is set to discuss her work on this topic at her Defense on the 12th of Se…

Promotor: A.P.IJzerman Co-promotor: A. Bender

Linking Empirical Academic thinking with Legal Practice. Internationally and particularly in the Netherlands. By René Orij, April, 2016.

Archaeologists often use the percentages of heat-affected stone or bone artifacts found at archaeological sites as a way to determine how frequently fire was used by the inhabitants. Andrew Sorensen and Fulco Scherjon have come up with a computer model called 'fiReproxies' to simulate how fires used…

In July, 2018, the Institute of Biology Leiden hosted the 11th conference of the Zebrafish Disease Models Society (ZDMS), an international association dedicated to the advancement of basic and clinical research using zebrafish disease models. More than 350 researchers from all over the world gathered…

A new study in Nature Plants has explored the most important organising principles that control vegetation behaviour. The insights from this study can be used to improve predictions on climate change. Leiden scientists Peter van Bodegom and Nadia Soudzilovskaia participated in the study.

Populist parties in national parliaments have a different style of working from their colleagues in other parties. They often vote against Cabinet proposals, but do not ask more questions about Cabinet activities. This is the finding of Leiden research in different European countries.

Warisa started as a Postdoc researcher at the Department of Environmental Biology of CML in March 2020.

Promotores: W.T. de Groot, M. Tchuenté, Co-promotor: J.P. Cheylan

Dishoeck

Many organisations have a biased workforce, even though diversity has so many advantages. Australian and Dutch researchers, including Leiden psychologist Romy van der Lee, have developed a solution based on a mathematical model. They published their findings in PLoS One on 28 July.

Professor of Human Genetics Willeke van Roon will give her inaugural lecture on Monday 28 March entitled: ‘Translational research, where small parts make the bigger picture.’ She will emphasise how university medical centres should take responsibility for finding treatments for very rare diseases.