Exceptional collaboration between physicians is needed to better understand and treat autoimmune diseases that cause inflammation in various organ systems.

Elise Sarton is using her inaugural lecture to give her field of anaesthesiology a chance to take the limelight for a change.

We need to dispel the arrogant and misguided idea that modern humans are superior to earlier human species. It is thanks in part to all our predecessors such as Neanderthals that we are who we are today. This is what Marie Soressi, Professor of Hominin Diversity Archaeology, will argue in her inaugural…

Does medicine make patients feel better or worse? We are getting better at predicting this from people’s DNA profiles, says Professor Jesse Swen. ‘It never fails to fascinate me how one DNA base pair can have such a huge effect on treatment with medication and the outcome.’

Arbitration law has grown into a ‘sexy’ area of practice about which students are keen to write a thesis and in which many lawyers specialise.

Jasper Knoester is the dean of the Faculty of Science. How is he doing, what exactly does he do and what does his day look like? In each newsletter, Jasper gives an insight into his life.

Search engines are getting better at answering our questions. And chatbots are increasingly likely to search the internet for relevant sources. ‘Search engines and chatbots will become more closely entwined’, says Professor Suzan Verberne.

Traces of the past remain hidden in rivers, lakes and seas. In his inaugural lecture Martijn Manders will explain why underwater archaeology is important to understanding our history.

Nearly all documents from the 16th and 17th centuries were written by more than one person but attributed to only one author. Professor Nadine Akkerman wants to rectify this oversight in her research on scribes.

The field of leadership suffers from ‘adjectivism’, says Professor Ben Kuipers. He immediately caveats this by saying that he too is going furnish the word leadership with an adjective: ‘Public’. But the goal here is to view leadership in a different light in his new role as Professor of Public Lead…

The bachelor's programme in International Studies is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Ko Voskuilen was among the very first batch of students to follow the study, and Sophia Healy graduated this summer. How do they look back on their time at the university?

Americans are electing a new president in November but they also have other choices to make in the polling booth. Alumnus Sanne Rijkhoff works at a Texas university and is trying to help make students more aware of the elections.

Raised by his grandmother and grandfather, trained as a doctor, the medical director of a camp for Eritrean refugees: Ephrem Tesfay was anything but a typical student when he arrived in Leiden in 2019. Still, he fit in well with the ‘youngsters’.

From 24 March 2021, Professor Luuk van Middelaar will deliver four public lectures on 'Geopolitical Europe: Acts and words' at the Collège de France in Paris, on the invitation of the Chairholder on International Institutional Law, Professor Samantha Besson.

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On 2 November, nine professors were simultaneously inaugurated as ‘Medical Delta Professor’ at Leiden University, LUMC, Delft University of Technology, Erasmus University and Erasmus MC. With an appointment at a minimum of two of these five academic institutions, they combine technology and healthcare…

This talk is about the RR initiative and how it can be deployed effectively in studies of brain and cognition, and with a particular focus on the new Peer Community in Registered Reports, which is a particularly powerful vehicle for RRs in this domain.

Albion highly condems Putin's actions and stands in solidarity with the Ukraine. In collaboration with two students from different faculties, we will organise a fundraising lecture! On Wednesday 16 March at 17.15, Dr Michael Newton and Dr Evert-Jan van Leeuwen will both hold short lectures in a Lipsius…

This year, Leiden University has appointed professor Gert Oostindie, professor emeritus of Colonial and post-Colonial History, to the Cleveringa Chair. He will accept this appointment with his inaugural Cleveringa lecture titled: Courage and Disregard.

Alumni event

Brain function is largely shaped by experience in early life, creating windows of both great opportunity and vulnerability. Our work has focused on the biological basis for such critical periods, identifying both “triggers” and “brakes” on plasticity. Strikingly, the maturation of particular inhibitory…

Friendships are a primate speciality, and have evolved to buffer us against the stresses of living in large social groups. They have a bigger effect on our psychological health and wellbeing, as well as our physical health and wellbeing, than anything else. Friendships are, however, extremely expensive…

The Neuropsychology of sex and gender: Exploring the facts and fictions of gender difference. Markus Hausmann is a professor at Durham University (UK) and head of the Department of psychology. His research covers the full range of topics that comprise biological and neuropsychology, from spatial cognition…

Starting from Brodmann’s idea of structural-functional relationships at the level of cortical areas, human brain studies benefit from detailed anatomical atlases. However, brain mapping is a dynamically developing field, and Brodmann’s map, which is a schematic view of an individual hemisphere, does…

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“Known unknowns and unknown unknowns – wrestling with clinical uncertainty at the end of life”

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No-one will deny the impact that a good ethnographic documentary can have on our understanding of the subjects (meant in terms of topic, theme and protagonists) of such a documentary, yet how do we define that understanding; what is it that we learn to understand about its subjects? How does this qualify…