High-quality education, research involving multiple faculties, collaboration between universities and central government funding to make all this possible: these were the topics covered in a working visit of the Standing Committee for Education, Culture and Science (OCW) to the Association of Universities…

Sense Jan van der Molen is vanaf 1 maart de nieuwe wetenschappelijk directeur van het Leiden Instituut voor Onderzoek in de Natuurkunde.

Didactics

University lecturer Lucien van Beek has been awarded a LUF Praesidium Libertatis Grant. He will use the sum of 75,000 euros to research the thinking of people in ancient and prehistoric times. To do that, he will look for unusual or striking metaphors in the earliest Indo-European languages.

Management, Leadership

'It gave our team a big boost to hear that our work was valuable,' says medical chemist Elmer Maurits about the moment they won the Venture Challenge. With their company Iprotics, they want to develop a drug that can better treat patients with autoimmune diseases and blood cancers. 25,000 euros of prize…

Symposium

Didactics, Didactics

This month, the new digital communication code of conduct came into force. Why did this code need to be in place? And what do we gain from it as a faculty? Dean Mark Rutgers and vice-dean Mirjam de Baar explain.

Dutch greenhouse horticulture is a world leader when it comes to innovative capacity and sustainability, but ‘the challenges are great in terms of energy, water, environment and biodiversity,’ says Peter van Bodegom, coordinator of AgriFood at the Centre for Sustainability of the Leiden, Delft, Erasmus…

Workshops

They dreamed of Brussels, worked hard and finally succeeded: working for Europe. The list of Leiden University alumni in Brussels is long. A few days before the European elections, Julia Gencheva and Vincent Miča talk about how they ended up in Brussels and what their jobs entail.

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…

National Meat Free Week (Nationale Week Zonder Vlees, 7–13 March) is an initiative to reduce meat consumption. Assistant professor Paul Behrens is studying what impact a change in our food consumption would have on the world. What, according to him, are the main reasons to switch to a (mainly) plant-based…

Does a communal garden provide cool air and warm neighbourly relations? Does an additional row of trees increase biodiversity? These kinds of questions are key in the COMBINED project, on which Leiden scientists and residents of The Hague, among others, can work for six years with 4 million euros from…

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…

Dario Fazzi works at the Institute for History as Assistant Professor. Although he's not not completely new to the Institute, he recently received a permanent appointment. Below he introduces himself!

Democracy may lead to more deforestation in the tropics. So write environmental scientist Joeri Morpurgo and his colleagues in the prominent scientific journal Biological conservation. They found that competitive elections are associated with more loss of tropical rainforest than elections without competition.…

The new VIS grant has been awarded to four projects from the Faculty of Humanities. In a Virtual International Cooperation Project (VIS), Dutch and foreign students work together remotely on a project that links local issues to an international perspective.

The Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea. Rerouting via South Africa is expensive, whereas the Arctic route only takes a week. Once a no-go zone, this route might be a more realistic option. Mind the nuclear submarines, though…

How can society let go of its obsession with economic growth and focus on goals as wellbeing, inclusion and sustainability? This is one of the core questions which a new 3 million euro European project will tackle the upcoming four years. Leiden University researcher Rutger Hoekstra is project coordinator…

In supermarkets, consumers are drowning in a sea of sustainability labels. Confusing for them, but also farmers can't see the forest for the trees. Obtaining these labels demands an enormous amount of time and effort. Berent Baris is investigating ways to simplify this process, benefiting both farmers…

Facility

Nanomaterials can pass much further along the food chain than was previously thought. The particles can change shape and size in each organism, enabling them to pass on to the next one in the chain. Researchers from the Institute of Environmental Sciences discovered this accidentally when using a novel…

Thirteen Leiden University exchange projects have been awarded an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility grant. The total award of around 450,000 euros will enable 103 students and staff to go on an exchange.

Whales in the vicinity of the city of Auckland, New Zealand consume large amounts of microplastics every day. A team of international researchers reached this conclusion after carefully examining whale poop. The team included Thijs Bosker, Associate Professor in Environmental Sciences at Leiden University…

Leiden academics Remco Breuker and Auke-Florian Hiemstra stand to win the title of Person of the Year.

After a gap of five years, Leiden has a new Professor of Modern China. Florian Schneider started his position on 1 September.

On 1 January Minna Valjakka was appointed Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory from a Global Perspective. Valjakka sees her appointment as 'extremely topical' because of the discussions about the decolonisation of the arts: 'Art teaches us not just about art, but also about contemporary…

With a €1.5 million European grant, industrial ecologist Stefano Cucurachi will work on more sustainable production methods for the pharmaceutical industry. The Italian company Angelini Pharma intends to use the resulting knowledge to make its production process more sustainable.

The energy transition is already a huge challenge for society, but sustainable use of resources is even more complicated. Yet it is at least as urgent. Ester van der Voet has been working on it for decades, for example within the United Nations. Since February, she is a professor at the Centre for Environmental…

The book ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science’ by Paul Behrens has been launched in the US, a year after its original release in Europe. In his book, Behrens describes both hopeful and pessimistic scenarios for our planet.

Leiden University and the Municipality of The Hague signed a collaboration agreement on sustainability on 1 November. Their main goals are to build a network, share knowledge and explore the possibilities of a Climate Centre for the people of The Hague.

Leiden University’s Living Lab is moving to the middle of the Leiden Bio Science Park. In the lab’s new home between the University of Applied Sciences, Mentor and Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the first ditches have now been dug. This new location is more accessible to both researchers and the public.…

The year 2023 saw the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the Wagner Group rebellion and wildfires and floods as all the weather records were smashed. Our most-read stories were about the climate crisis and the elections: here’s the list.

On Tuesday 12 January 2021, the annual Meijers prizes and thesis prizes were awarded at the online New Year’s event broadcast from the Old Observatory.

Christina Toenshoff has been awarded the Virginia Walsh Dissertation Award for her PhD dissertation on corporate climate lobbying. The Leiden Political Scientist, according to the jury, ‘makes a significant contribution to the study of climate and business politics.’

Four Leiden researchers have been awarded Proof of Concept grants by the ERC. These grants, each worth 150,000 euros, help researchers translate the findings of previous ERC projects into innovative practical applications.

Is polder rice a feasible circular alternative for cows on peatland? A pilot experiment started this week. On May 22nd, researchers from Leiden University and Wageningen University & Research (WUR) planted roughly 3,000 rice plants on the Polderlab near Leiden. The researchers want to test rice as a…

From energy transition to the nitrogen crisis: artificial intelligence can be of great help. Researchers from the three universities in Zuid-Holland are seizing the opportunity. Three of them talk about collaborative research in the AI for Energy and Sustainability focus group within the Zuid-Holland…

The most problematic themes in the Faculty of Humanities are workload and social safety, according to the recently completed Personnel Monitor. What happens now?

The article deals with an issue that will be at the heart of the World Health Assembly to be held in May, namely the concept of ‘deep prevention’ and the importance of its integration in the Global Pandemic Treaty - which has been recently proposed by the European Council and currently endorsed by more…

Koos Biesmeijer, Professor of Natural Capital, and Claire van Megen, an Educational and Child Studies student, are in with a chance of winning Leiden’s Person of the Year title.

Auke-Florian Hiemstra is the Leidsch Dagblad Person of the Year 2022.

In this episode we talk with Mara van der Meulen about prosocial behaviour and social exclusion in children. Van der Meulen also explores the role of genetics and environment in the development of social behaviour. To find out more about her research on why some children are beter able to develop their…

On April 12th three students majoring in Earth, Energy, and Sustainability (EES) from Leiden University College participated in the annual conference of the Netherlands Center for River Studies.

Nanotechnology has pervaded numerous industrial sectors over the past decades. Although many of us may not be aware of it, nanomaterials are now embedded within many of the the products we use in our daily lives. The agricultural sector might be next in line. Leiden environmental scientists Tom Nederstigt…