Er is een nijpend cellen- en personeelstekort in Nederlandse gevangenissen. En dit is niet voor de eerste keer. Miranda Boone, hoogleraar criminologie en vergelijkende penologie, sprak met Trouw over de problematiek: ‘Het aantal gevangenen is het resultaat van beleid.’

On 4 July Cora Zwart will defend her dissertation "Religious book owners and their networks. Lay religious practices and social connectivity in the urbanized Low Countries (c.1370-c.1550)". De defense will take place at 11.00 in the auditorium of the Academy Building of the RuG.

A revolutionary supercomputer with energy-efficient parts that are available in the shops. Professor of Computational Astrophysics Simon Portegies Zwart has been awarded an NWO Medium Grant to build this processing giant, which will have the power of a supercomputer but requires only one percent of…

Leiden astronomy Master's student Arend Moerman has received an A+ for his thesis research on the simulation of chaotic interactions of three black holes. The simulations, which he carried out together with his Leiden and Oxford colleagues, show that lighter black holes tend to slingshot each other…

Finally we know for sure that there is a black hole at the centre of our own galaxy. Today, astronomers unveiled the first ever photo of Sagittarius A*, a super-massive object at the centre of the Milky Way. This picture could only be taken thanks to the cooperation of telescopes worldwide.

Volgende week lanceren we de nieuwe podcast Mind the Gap, een initiatief dat studenten begeleidt bij de overgang van afstuderen naar hun eerste baan. Hosts Laura van der Plas en Loes Velthuis vertellen in dit interview meer over de podcast, waarin ze praktische tips delen voor een realistische en zelfverzekerde…

How can we broaden youth participation in STEM Learning

Collaborators and advisors of the Plant BioDynamics Laboratory

What are ‘missing links’ in research on teacher professional development trajectories? We focus on the role and development of teacher facilitators in designing and implementing (collaborative) professional development trajectories.

Promotor: Prof.dr. S.F. Portegies Zwart

Promotor: Prof.dr. S.F. Portegies Zwart, Co-promotor: D.C. Heggie

Promotor: Prof.dr. S. Portegies Zwart

Xinrong Ma defended her thesis on 13 February 2018

Supervisor: S.F. Portegies Zwart Co-Supervisor: A.G.A. Brown

Promotores: S.F. Portegies Zwart, E. M. Rossi

This research cluster is a part of the Institute of Political Science’s research programme ‘Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviour’. Its members study phenomena such as migration, immigration, citizenship, integration, ethnic parties, minority and caste-based politics, borders and migration,…

An international collaboration of astronomers is organising a special online lecture series for physicists and astronomers in Cuba. The reason for this is the tightening of measures against this country, as a result of which researchers can hardly get any information from outside the island. ‘Everyone…

How do secondary school teachers’ professional learning preferences relate to teaching experience and the school context?

Muslims have lived in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe for centuries. Their arrival in Western Europe, the two Americas and Australia is however relatively recent. Studying how Muslims relate to their Western environment (and vice versa) and the mutual influences of Western and Islamic philosophies…

These are the proposed research projects for LEAPS 2019. Please note that not all projects will go ahead and some may still be added in the near future. Final funding decisions lie with the Faculty sponsors. And please make a note that if you are interested in an ESA project, to check if your state…

The objective of this project is to understand the content and structure of science teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, and how these change in the context of pre-service teacher education and educational innovation.

The objective of this project is to show how teacher research can encourage teachers’ learning process as professionals, improve teaching practices and generate knowledge about these practices.

Mapping sanitary infrastructure in large urban societies in the Low Countries, 1200–1900

To what extent do beginning teachers use, create and claim agency at their school?

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…

What’s the fate of our sun, when in 5 billion years from now our Milky Way will clash with the Andromeda Galaxy? Leiden astronomers have been working on calculations on this collision. They recently gave a visual sneak preview on a big tech conference.

Professor Simon Portegies Zwart and doctor Jeroen Bédorf had the honour to write for the IEEE Software magazine.

Adrian Hamer, who obtained his PhD in the group of Simon Portegies Zwart on 21 June 2016, receives a prestigious PhD thesis award prize of the International Astronomical Union. Hamers is one of the most talented, young, theoretical astrophysicists, according to the jury.

Leiden astronomers published two articles on more sustainable astronomy in a special section of the journal Nature Astronomy. Among other things, they calculate that their online conference EAS 2020 consumed three thousand times less carbon dioxide than the face-to-face edition a year earlier. They…

The orbits of 27 stars orbiting closely around the black hole at the center of our Milky Way are very chaotic. As a result, researchers cannot predict with confidence where they will be in about 462 years. ‘That is astonishingly short,’ says astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart who collaborated on the r…

When galaxies collide, do the black holes at their centre form a supersized black hole? This is what we think happens, but it's not as simple as that, according to Simon Portegies Zwart. Zwart, computer scientist and astronomer, has been awarded a VICI grant to research this phenomenon.

Three Leiden astronomers have shown that some asteroids that are considered harmless for now, can collide with Earth in the future. They did their research with the help of an artificial neural network. The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A Dutch collaboration, including the SURF Open Innovation Lab and Leiden Observatory, has won Hyperion Research's HPC Innovation Excellence Award. This is the first time that a Dutch team has won the award. The team received the award for improving large-scale numerical simulations with deep learnin…

Two black holes, in close orbit around each other. Have they slowly drifted together, or did they emerge from two orbiting stars? Together with to colleagues form Amsterdam, Leiden astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart calculated that the second scenario is rather likely.

Astronomer Alexander Mushtukov, currently working at the University of Amsterdam, received a Veni grant of 250,000 euro’s which he will execute in Leiden. Supervised by Simon Portegies Zwart, Mushtukov will use advanced simulations to understand the unknown physics in extremely bright neutron stars.

A team of Leiden astronomers has managed to calculate the first 100 million years of the history of the Oort cloud in its entirety. Until now, only parts of the history had been studied separately. The cloud, with roughly 100 billion comet-like objects, forms an enormous shell at the edge of our solar…

Simon Portegies Zwart, professor of Computational Astrophysics, uses computers to simulate the evolution of stars. We speak with him about his field and about the challenges of working with huge amounts of complex data.

How can we make Sinterklaas inclusive as a national holiday? And what does this mean for our University community and Dutch society as a whole? These questions were the focus of the first edition of ‘Come Talk to Us’, a series of online dialogues organised by the Diversity & Inclusion Expertise Office…

If three or more objects move around each other, history cannot be reversed. That is the conclusion of an international team of researchers based on computer simulations of three black holes orbiting each other. The researchers, led by the Dutch astronomer Tjarda Boekholt, publish their findings in…

A team of Dutch scientists has built a supercomputer the size of four pizza boxes. The Little Green Machine II has the computing power of 10,000 PCs and will be used by researchers in oceanography, computer science, artificial intelligence, financial modeling and astronomy. The computer is based at…

What was the function of the Dutch Protestant Church in Sri Lankan society? Why did people relate to the Church and how did conversion influence their life course?

The project seeks to come to an understanding of the archaeology of the desert and the ways in which its inhabitants engaged with their constraint, marginal environments through time. It compares and interprets site distribution and community organisation over a long time scale and across several different…

The renovation of the Herta Mohr building (formerly known as Cluster Zuid) is completed. It is the third project in the redevelopment of the Humanities Campus. With the renewal of these buildings, the university ensures a sustainable campus with modern facilities. The university wants to create an attractive…