To make education more inclusive for students with disabilities, it is essential that there is sufficient expertise available in this area within the university. The expertise building group aims to increase knowledge about studying with disabilities among lecturers, student supervisors and other university…

Forest degradation has limited the Orang Rimba's access to forest resources. As a result, they've had to make significant cultural modifications and adaptations. Ekoningtyas Margu Wardani explains in her PhD dissertation these transformation processes among Contemporary Indonesian Hunter-Gatherers through…

You should start working now, and the positive results will only be seen long after your term has expired. That is just about the worst thing you can say to politicians and policymakers. Yet that is exactly the message of two recent reports on sustainable resource use from the Centre for Environmental…

Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker will retire on 8 February. If there’s one theme running through his career, it’s the links between the University and society. In this series of pre-retirement discussions, Stolker will talk one last time to people from within and without the University. This time he…

Excessive regulatory burden causes economic harm and can undermine trust in government. Policymakers wishing to ease this should be more mindful of people’s differing responses to rules, says PhD candidate Ritsart Plantenga in his dissertation.

Conference, Knowledge Café

Governments and public sector organisations consider evidence-based or evidence-informed policymaking as one of the pillars of good governance. That is to say: policies that are informed by scientific knowledge, expertise and evidence. In the research programme 'Power of Evidence', Valérie Pattyn and…

The importance of a healthy lifestyle does not receive the attention it deserves, as the coronavirus pandemic made painfully clear. Twelve behavioural scientists, including Professor Behavioral Interventions in Population Health Management Marieke Adriaanse and Professor of Health Psychology Andrea…

Cutting down global emissions of greenhouse gases to combat global warming won’t do the trick alone: we also need negative-emissions technology that can capture carbon dioxide directly out of the air. In the prestigious journal Global Environmental Change, PhD candidate Oscar Rueda and colleagues shed…

Positive expectations about treatment increase the likelihood of success. The new Center for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies Leiden is therefore promoting research on the placebo effect and offering expertise and training for care providers. At the opening, the founders demonstrated their VR communications…

In our new strategic plan (Innovating and Connecting – 2022-2027) we focus on stronger connections: between disciplines, with society and within our university community.

In dermatology, there should be a high level of multidisciplinary collaboration among institutes and specialists, Professor of Translational Dermatology, Robert Rissmann, will say in his inaugural lecture on 8 July. He is building an infrastructure that will put pre-clinical and clinical skin research…

Technology, medical knowledge, social measures and the design of the living environment: all these needed to achieve a healthier society. In a series of interviews, 14 researchers from Zuid-Holland, including from Leiden University, argue for an integrated care approach.

Organisation

The Opening of the Academic Year 2024 will be held in Pieterskerk on Monday 2 September. This year’s theme is ‘Science for Policy’. Students, staff and anyone else who is interested are welcome.

The Leiden Research Support Network is the essential network for research support professionals within Leiden University, where colleagues from the various faculty (virtual) Research Support Offices and central service units work together and share their knowledge to provide optimum support for researchers…

The presence and participation of interest groups in policymaking processes has become a crucial component of Western democracies. These groups link society and policymakers and influence public policy choices. Their function however, is often taken for granted and not very well researched. Adrià Albareda…

As part of the LIAISON Research Project, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga and Hadassah Drukarch organised a workshop at the European Robotics Forum (ERF 2021) to engage the broader community in the projects’ goal of liaising robot development and policymaking.

Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, together with Hadassah Drukarch and Carlos Calleja, explores how compliance tools could be used as data generators for policy purposes to optimise regulatory frameworks for existing and emerging robot technologies.

Research

The Harmonisation of Educational Logistics programme is a University-wide programme spanning several years. A programme structure has been developed to ensure that everything runs smoothly, that the University takes the right steps and decisions and that the right people are involved in the programme.…

Lifelong development at Leiden University: learn, develop, grow

research support portal

Inaugural lecture

PhD defence

Workshop

Vanessa mak knaw

On Safer Internet Day (Tuesday 6 February), UNICEF Netherlands organised a symposium on the theme of 'Children's rights in the digital world' in collaboration with Leiden University and Kennisnet. Simone van der Hof and Ton Liefaard contributed to the symposium.

One perspective, one cell, one outlook on life: what are we all prisoners of? That’s the question Vrij Nederland put to various experts, including Joni Reef, Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at the Department of Criminology.

PhD defence

In Spring 2023, Leiden University’s Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) launched a new Honours Class ‘Model European Union Simulation: Policies, Negotiations and Transatlantic Experiential Learning’.

To what extent can global issues be solved by multistakeholder collaboration, a relatively new type of organisation? Jan Aart Scholte, the coordinator of the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) interdisciplinary research programme, has received a Dutch Research Council (NWO) grant…

Han Meyer, Carola Hein, Paul van de Laar and Sabine Luning, argue that in the current moment of major crises these ship channels necessitate radical reconsideration.

Researchers and policymakers are welcome to attend the AI & Society Conference in The Hague on Friday 23 June. The SAILS interdisciplinary research programme will be taking a nuanced look at the state of the art of AI technology. And offering fresh perspectives.

The Social Citizenship and Migration interdisciplinary research programme is holding its annual symposium on 17 January 2024. This is the chance for Leiden researchers to share their experiences with a large network of colleagues with expertise in migration and social impact.

A banker who puts making money second and makes a profit nonetheless. A farmer who stops ploughing and using insecticides but still has a good harvest. A new white paper by Leiden-Delft-Erasmus and Naturalis Biodiversity Center shows how the meeting of disciplines provides solutions to climate change…

A 5 million euros grant from the Dutch Research Agenda allows Anouk de Koning and co-applicants Femke Kaulingfreks and Maartje van der Woude to study social interventions in eight Dutch cities in an innovative and interdisciplinary way.

On 13 March 2024, Carlotta Rigotti, postdoc researcher at eLaw, and Alexandre Puttick, postdoc researcher at Bern University of Applied Sciences, remotely presented the working paper 'Towards mitigating diversity bias of AI in recruitment and selection via value sensitive design' at the ACM Symposium…

Four students of the Faculty of Archaeology investigated how the current and past inhabitants of the Dutch province of South Holland deal with water. Their findings now feature in an exhibition that can now be visited in the Van Steenis building’s Reuvenshal.

In the current political situation of Bulgaria, it seems that a long-term caretaker government is the only viable option at the moment. Dimiter Toshkov, Antoaneta Dimitrova and Bernard Steunenberg of FGGA analyse what the Bulgarian caretaker government can learn from its Dutch counterpart.

Freya Baetens, Professor of European Law, has been awarded a Chair by the Francqui Foundation in Belgium for the impact of her work on lawmaking and policymaking in Europe and beyond.

The end of the year often means looking back with lists, overviews and stories. This combines nicely in a list of all the books published this year by various political scientists at Leiden University. Indeed, in terms of books, these scholars have certainly not been idle. A unique collection of stories,…

The Capacity to Innovate is a recently published book by Sarah Giest, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. In this article Sarah gives insight in the main findings of the book and the experience developing it.