Harm reduction in practice: a comparative analysis of the Dutch and Brazilian approach towards drug users.

Antibiotics are a class of medicine most people take for granted. But pathogenic bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to our antibiotics, and this poses a great challenge for future treatments. There is thus a great societal need to identify new molecules that can address new targets and be…

Suzan Tunca was the first dancer to receive her PhD from PhDArts at Leiden University. Her work focuses on the relationship between the physical and metaphysical. 'It took a while to find the right tone and language for this.'

What is dark matter? How do supermassive black holes form? ‘Primordial’ black holes might hold the answer to these long-standing questions. Leiden and Chinese cosmologists have identified a new way in which these hypothetical objects could be produced just after the Big Bang. Publication in Physical…

Promotores: E. van Dijk, G.R. de Snoo. Co-promotor: H. Staats

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

Students taking the new bachelor’s course ‘Social Movements and Political Violence’ are about to do something new. In addition to studying textbooks and academic articles, they will actively work with multimedia materials and engage in online storytelling. Course instructor Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden…

Nowadays children grow up with social media. This may influence the development of brain regions involved in social interaction. In their review article in Nature Communications, Crone and Konijn illustrate how neuroscience can contribute to a better understanding of how media and peers influence adolescents'…

Are there significant differences among the environmental impacts resulting form the production of Asian aquaculture commodities and what are the main causes for these?

An international team of researchers led by Alice Booth (Leiden University, the Netherlands) have discovered methanol in the warm part of a planet-forming disk. The methanol cannot have been produced there and must have originated in the cold gas clouds from which the star and the disk formed. Thus,…

How can misleading graphs be effectively corrected, specifically for people with low graph literacy?

The channel through which two cell components exchange material appears to form at the edge of their contact surface, and not in the middle. This was discovered by the Leiden physical chemists Jelger Risselada and Edgar Blokhuis together with researchers from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.…

How can video on professional practices in university courses be used in a valid and useful way for assessment and feedback?

In her “Jews and Judaism” lecture class in Fall 2020, Dr. Sarah Cramsey’s students produced 7-minute long podcasts instead of final papers.

In her “Jews and Judaism” lecture class, Dr. Sarah Cramsey’s students produced 7-minute long podcasts instead of final papers.

This article illustrates how the term 'dual use' has become associated with a broader dichotomy between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ purposes.

An international team of astronomers including Leiden professor Ewine van Dishoeck has observed the benzene molecule (C6H6) in a planet-forming disk around a young star for the first time. The observations tell us more about the forming of planets in this disc, like our own Earth. The scientists publish…

The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 presents a new perspective on the uses of justice between 1600 and 1900 and confronts prevailing Eurocentric historiography in its examination of how people of this period made use of the law.

We aim to develop a drug-delivery method based on the production of biomolecules directly at the target site.

How do harrowing war experiences affect different generations? Students have made a video about poignant family stories. They interviewed other students and writer Dubravka Ugrešić. The premiere of the film was on 4 May during the online Hour of Remembrance. Watch this online memorial.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have for the first time detected dimethyl ether in a planet-forming disc. With nine atoms, this is the largest molecule identified in such a disc to date. It is also a precursor…

The project focusses on how US views of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia influenced its strategic interpretations of the region. Being eleven million strong, dispersed across the region and sharing ethnic ties with Communist China, interpretations of the diaspora intersected with key Cold War…

During times of domestic turmoil, the use of force abroad becomes an appealing strategy to US presidents in hopes of diverting attention away from internal conditions and toward a foreign policy success.

Understanding the water use of power production is an important step to both a sustainable energy transition and an improved understanding of water conservation measures. However, there are large differences across the literature that currently present barriers to decision making.

Real-life processes are characterized by dynamics involving time. Examples are walking, sleeping, disease progress in medical treatment, and events in a workflow.

The work described in this dissertation contributes to a better mechanistic understanding of nanoparticles in vivo. To achieve that goal, we used the zebrafish as a highly predictive pre-screening model of nanoparticles.

A research goal for ABS is to develop miniaturized platforms for research in (stem)cell, in-vitro systems and application in clinical and preventive research. Combined with the high throughput, this development will make it possible to study the dynamics of pathogenesis in human and cellular models…

This project aims to explore and examine the factors that impact upon the efficacy of information disclosure duties pertaining to customer data use in online business.

Development of an aggregated impact indicator to measure decoupling.

Researchers at LED3 are working together with biopharmaceutical company Galapagos to develop software for use in early drug discovery (funded by NWO). This software is able to design molecules with several simultaneously optimized characteristics and will also take prediction reliability into consideration…

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Hankemeier, Co-promotor: Dr. Theo Reijmers

A modern ship design process is subject to a wide variety of constraints such as safety constraints, regulations, and physical constraints.

Which immune mechanisms are involved in host defense against Staphylococcal infection?

A better balance between teaching and research duties, greater recognition of team performances and the elimination of simplistic assessment criteria. The ‘Academia in Motion’ paper published by the Leiden University Recognition and Rewards describes the main problems with recognition and rewards in…

This case study demonstrates how to design and effectively deploy a (survey embedded) conjoint experiment.

Although sugars are widely used in biological and medical research, their synthesis is still badly understood. Jeroen Codée has received a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros for systematically studying the production of sugars. ‘I want to genuinely understand the reactions.’

The many thousands of small celestial bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit may have ended up there due to a star that passed close to the solar system billions of years ago. This is shown by Leiden simulation expert Simon Portegies Zwart, along with his German and Dutch colleagues. ‘We are answering several…

How to access the end-of-supply risk of spare pares using big data analytics

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

Today, 189 out of 193 officially recognised nation-states have a written constitution, and 75% of these have been ratified since 1975. How did this worldwide diffusion of constitutions come about?

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States.

The objective of this study is to better understand the distribution of microplastics in the environment. More specifically, we will quantify the abundance and distribution of microplastics on beaches.

Exploiting metabolic vulnerabilities to identify anticancer compounds in zebrafish synthetic lethality screens.

The SAPPAO project aims to optimise the accuracy and reliability of predicting scheduled flight times. The full name of the project is 'A Systems Approach towards Data Mining and Prediction in Airlines Operations'.

Is it possible for sugar patterns on cells to activate the immune system to combat cancer?

An international team of astronomers, including Leiden’s Christian Ginski, has discovered previously unobserved structures in a debris disk around a nearby star. Article published in Nature on 8 October.

Promotores: J.N. Kok, H.J. Hoogeboom

People in the Early Bonze Age used bronze artefacts as a means of payment. This is the conclusion reached by archaeologists Maikel Kuijpers and Catalin Popa in a PLOS ONE article published on 20 January. The discovery led to a surge of media reports.