Jean-Eric Paquet, a Director-General at the European Commission, visited Leiden University on 20 February. He was impressed by the researchers’ drive, the wide range of topics that they research and the strong collaboration with Leiden Bio Science Park.

In 2022, many of our staff and students won fantastic prizes and were awarded important research grants.

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2021, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

The aim of the project is to unravel the genetic and contact relations between the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and western Central America) and the Middle Andes region (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), as part of a larger endeavor to understand the historical process of the peopling of the Americas…

Dishoeck

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.

We are interested in understanding the mechanics of soft materials, of which biological materials are prominent examples.

Nowadays, most Europeans speak a language belonging to the Indo-European language family. However, very different languages were spoken on our continent before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The EUROLITHIC project tries to find answers to the question which languages these were and where they came…

The CMCB brings together microbial cell biology expertise in Leiden. It aims at optimal resonance between the groups and maximal exploitation of the available infrastructure and to develop innovative cross-boundary technology platforms.

Imami Shiʿism was a key part of the turbulent thesis and antithesis which formed Islam, and it remains greatly influential today. The aim of the ImBod project is to write the first comprehensive social history of the Imamate.

Leiden has a strong tradition in theoretical physics, thoroughly linked with experimental disciplines.

ASLU 28 Michalis Karambinis (2015)

A technique originally developed for satellite imaging can now be used to recover pictographic texts from underneath the surface of a five hundred year old Mexican manuscript.

The present volume focuses on the political perceptions of the Hajj, its global religious appeal to Muslims, and the European struggle for influence and supremacy in the Muslim world in the age of pre-colonial and colonial empires.

Beenakker

Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) are widely used, and nanotechnological innovations grow with rapid pace. Studies on nanotoxicology have demonstrated that chemical toxicology as well as particle toxicology should be accounted for in predicting the safety of ENMs.

Novel methods for understanding key aspects that are essential to the future of Bayesian inference for high- or infinite-dimensional models and data.

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

Overkleeft

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

How do technologies of computer vision, which promise to replace humans in the understanding of images, work in practice in the field of security, and what are their ethical and political implications?

How is energy really dissipated on the atomic scale when sliding objects slip over a single lattice spacing?

Research into the evolutionary backgrounds of our diets can help us make the right choices in diet, health and lifestyle.

Terrorist groups adapt to environmental changes to maintain power. This project provides new insights by developing a theory of strategic target selection and using big data analytics and machine learning to test these hypotheses.

We are cosmologists, in other words we use physics to study the Universe, how it started and evolved into the structure that we observe around us.

In 2023, many of our students and staff won great prizes and secured important research grants.

The second phase of Global Interactions will see a significant expansion of our funding program. With an annual budget of nearly 150,000 euros, we will introduce larger 'Breed' grants, post-docs and cross-faculty teaching development grants in addition to a slightly expanded program of seed grants.

Japanese was not always the language spoken in Japan. Researchers link the arrival of the language in Japan with the migration of farmers around 400 BC. Linguist Elisabeth de Boer has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to carry out research on the further spread of the language in Japan.

The following maps show institutional collaborations and with indigenous communities (scroll down).

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a major multidisciplinary research project which aims to re-vision the history of Asia in one of its most significant periods. The project is based at the British Museum, British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and…

My ERC Starting Grant, funded with €1.5 million for 5 years as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, is focused on building the early warning system WARN-D to reliably forecast depression in young adults before it occurs. Why depression, and why prediction?

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2017, as well as special appointments and royal distinctions.

The hypothesis of this research is that the municipality used the impressive the Town Hall to enforce its rule and represent its political ideas and make use of sources such as biographies, poems, pamphlets, sermons and governmental documents.

The main objective of this research is to map out the cities of the Roman Near East in the imperial period, with a focus on location, city size and urban features, in order to study the form the urban system and its levels of integration.

The overall aim of the project is to investigate interests and their development over time in a daily life context, with particular attention for the transition from late secondary to post secondary education, and from late post secondary education to early career.

How do plant defense genes get activated?

How do we explain the fact that certain areas had many large cities, while other areas were studded with large numbers of small towns and yet other areas had very few urban agglomerations of any kind?

This study relates the vicissitudes of the Amerindian peoples who lived or still inhabit the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, from the earliest occupants, ca. 8000 BC, until at present.

The research aims to understand how did Cuban and Dominican landscape encapsulate historical conceptual transformations about human –nature spiritual interaction after the Spanish conquest? More specifically, what are the present day cultural associations with Cuban and Dominican natural landscape?…

This research will investigate which aspects of On the sublime received attention in the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century and how the sublime found its way in the political and artistic discourse of that time. Thus I aim to shed light on the role of art in politics and society in this…

The principle aim of the project is to study the genesis and the quantitative properties of the Early Roman urban network of the Balkan and the Danube provinces.

Can light-activatable ruthenium compounds be used as a more selective anticancer treatment?

How did people in the latter part of the Late Bronze Age organize themselves in order to be able to erect massive structures such as tholos tombs, citadels and how did they interact with these materials and circumstances while constructing? What impact did such a changing landscape have on their day-to-day…

This project will clarify how these concepts operated in theoretical writings on performance ,this broadened conceptual framework will not only give us a clear view on how sublime effects in performance were theorized, it will also provide us a concrete apparatus to understand the cultural and political…

Why does the past elicit this intense activity in the present? What does the past mean for the present, and what does it do to it? A WAR OF WORDS will engage this complex of Chinese claims to Manchu-Korean ancient history, South Korean reactions, public discourse and cultural expression in both states,…

Through his project we will unravel the global regulatory networks that control gene expression in Streptomyces bacteria and allow them to properly respond to major changes in the environment; we will then harness this knowledge to activate and identify novel antibiotics

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this…

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

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?