In June 2023, it was already announced that the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences will continue to use the Pieter de la Court building until at least 2035. This offers perspective, which is why various departments are working on a plan for works to improve comfort, appearance and sustainabi…

Organisation

Specially for an experiment conducted by Leiden University, public administration experts and water authority officials came together in a laboratory.

With the long lockdown, it’s been a hard year for Leiden businesses. How can the local economy bounce back and how can the University help? Two talk shows discussing this were recently recorded in the Academy Building. They will be aired on Unity TV on 28 September and 12 October.

Complex research with a generous sprinkling of jargon: PhD defences can be difficult for non-experts to follow. In the compulsory new lay talk, PhD candidates begin by explaining their dissertation in words of one syllable. And it’s not just the PhD’s family and friends who appreciate this.

What do people wonder about on social media? University lecturer Matthijs Westera is the recipient of an NWO grant to investigate what people are curious about online.

An image has great powers of persuasion. It is said that ‘a picture is worth more than a thousand words’. But these days, images can easily be manipulated with severe consequences. ‘Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the value we attach to images’, says Elize de Mul, whose PhD thesis deals with ‘digital…

Andrew Hoffman (CADS), Mark Westmoreland (CADS) and Yasmin Ismail (CADS) have received a KIEM grant of € 10.000 for their project 'CARMA: Community Archive and Repository for Multimodal and Artistic Research'. The grant will be used to create a 'living laboratory' that helps researchers, data management…

The new Students for Leiden party pulled off a stunning victory in the municipal elections. From nowhere, the party won two seats on Leiden Municipal Council. How are brand-new student councillors Mitchell Wiegand Bruss and Elianne Wijnands doing? ‘We’ve already asked questions about the quality of…

After the summer, the SPSS statistics programme will be replaced by the new ‘R’ software for first year students. Hemmo Smit and Sjoerd Huisman, both lecturers in Methodology and Statistics, initiated this major change in the curriculum. That did not happen overnight.

How do you make niche subjects interesting and accessible? Benjamin Suchard, historical linguist and researcher, seems to have created the perfect recipe, which consists of his various projects alongside his regular research, including a Twitter account and a major international film.

The student navigator 'Find your way' helps students find their way around the university. Student advisers can also be found on the roadmap. JanPieter, student advisor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), explains what a student advisor does.

An international team of scientists, including Xander Tielens of Leiden Observatory, has used space telescope Hubble and the ALMA observatory to show that UV radiation from massive stars can prevent planets from forming. The researchers publish their findings on 1 March in the journal Science.

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Four prints, ten years of research. Not that she got bored of them, on the contrary. Corrie van Maris, who receives her PhD this week, has always remained fascinated by her 17th-century series, for which she feels so much love. ‘I kept seeing different, new things.’

Attention to the colonial past may be increasing, but many aspects of it are still underexposed. Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in collaboration with, among others, Leiden researchers Anne-Marieke van der Wal-Rémy and Alicia Schrikker, therefore created a 'canon of the Dutch underexposed past', which…

Ab de Jong, professor of Comparative Religion, was appointed as the new the academic director of the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) with effect from 1 September. We asked him about his plans for the future of the LIAS.

On Thursday 1 February, the symposium ‘On interdisciplinary collaboration: How do we foster connections?’ will take place. The event will discuss lessons learned, but also look at the future. An essential event for every Leiden researcher who is involved in an interdisciplinary collaboration, or would…

The interdisciplinary, English-taught minor ‘Violence Studies’ looks at violence from very diverse scientific perspectives. What are the benefits from this approach? Students and lecturers evaluate: ‘This minor’s a goldmine’.

How did Scottish speakers sound hundreds of years ago? University lecturer Mo Gordon thinks the answer to that question can be found in church archives. 'It can be a boost to your identity to know the history of your language.'

When it comes to literature, people mostly talk about what characters see or hear. Rarely is it about what they smell. That’s a shame, thinks university lecturer Jan van Dijkhuizen. He has been awarded an Open Competition grant from NWO to expand academic knowledge about scent in literature, and to…

Sinéad Mulcahy recently started the Europaeum Scholars Programme, a two-year policy and leadership course for a group of thirty talented and committed PhD candidates from universities across Europe. She is already enthusiastic – both about the programme and her fellow scholars. ‘I would like to bring…

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The university campus at Leiden Bio Science Park will change rapidly over the next few years. A short film shows the transformation to a full campus. See what this mix of new university buildings, student accommodation and restaurants and cafés will look like. And sustainability and biodiversity won’t…

On September 16th, 2024, Dr Arjan Louwen was inaugurated to the Young Academy Leiden. This platform serves to bring young, enthusiastic and driven early career (post-PhD) academics together. ‘I find it a really inspiring and welcoming group.’

Matthew Canfield (Assistant Professor, Van Vollenhoven Institute) and Danielle Chevalier (Assistant Professor Law & Society, Van Vollenhoven Institute) both received XS Grants from the NWO Open Competition SSH for their respective research projects. These grants are a maximum of €50,000 and enable…

JSixty researchers have received a grant of approximately 50,000 Euros during round 3 of the NWO Open Competition SSH-XS pilot programme. Two of them are working at FGGA: Jolien van Breen and Honorata Mazepus. The sixty researchers received the grant to start working on a promising concept or an innovative…

Prof. dr. Joanne van der Leun is tot september 2025 door het College van Bestuur van de Universiteit Leiden herbenoemd als decaan van de faculteit Rechtsgeleerdheid.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has granted four grants to Leiden humanities scholars. They get to spend this money on research on a topic of their choice, without thematic preconditions.

The future is digital. That is why the new Humanities Hub for Digital Research Skills, and Media (in short: Humanities Hub) will soon open its doors in the Johan Huizinga building. This Hub brings together a number of innovative labs that are in line with the development of the new Humanities Campus,…

Maartje van der Woude, (Professor of Law & Society, Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden University) has received an NWO research grant. This year, 60 of these grants in the Domain of Social Sciences and Humanities were awarded by research funder NWO. It is a prestigious grant for research on a topic…

On 7 and 8 October, a two-day workshop will be hosted by the Van Vollenhoven Institute in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Border Criminologies network and the Social Citizenship & Migration assisted area. The theme of the workshop will be ‘Border policing, boundary creation and emotion…

Just like the professional riders from the Jumbo-Visma team, amateur cyclists will soon be able to analyse and improve their performance. Leiden data scientists working with the cycling team are making their smart data model available so that every serious cyclist can keep track of their fitness.

Julie Külsen is the student member on the Faculty Board, called the assessor, this academic year at Leiden Law School. Who is Julie and what does the assessor actually do? How can she help students? Let’s meet our new assessor!

Older people are often approached from the perspective of their limitations when there is often much they still can and want to do. According to Professor Tineke Abma, art is a good way to continue to participate.

‘Everyone’s talking about it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, but the reality is disappointing,’ says biochemist Gerard van Westen in his 3 October University lecture in the Van der Werfpark. In the full marquee, he gets a laugh with this suggestion that artificial intelligence is comparable…

How can I align science, society and myself to address today’s major challenges? That’s what students of the Honours College track ‘Science, Society and Self’ aim to find out. How do their classes at honours differ from their regular education?

A shepherd, but also a comparativist and historian with very broad interests. That is how Professor Philippe Buc describes himself. As of 1 August 2021, he will hold the chair of professor of Medieval History at the university. In an introductory interview, Buc introduces himself, his research and his…

How do games help shape our perception of the past? Associate Professor Angus Mol receives a Vidi grant to answer this question.

‘Working in Leiden is a dream come true.’ Ákos Kovács studied in his birth country Hungary and worked in Germany, Denmark and Groningen. As professor of Microbiome Ecology at IBL, he immediately started working together with his new colleagues to make discoveries about the versatile bacterial species…

After two virtual editions, the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences could finally come together in real life again to celebrate the start of the new year. So it’s no surprise that the central hall of the Pieter de la Court Building was filled with lively chatter during the New Year’s Reception,…

Roughly arrested and subjected to extreme isolation. Using his experience, expert Jason Bhugwandass spoke to 50 young people who have spent time on Zikos wards (‘very intense, short-term observation and stabilisation wards’). He concluded that they’re ‘mostly locked up’ and leave ‘even more traumatised’…

Student dean Romke Biagioni is committed to help students have an easygoing and pleasant time during their studies. She assists students with disabilities, looks for solutions to problems such as housing issues and counsels students with social or financial problems. For MSc student Computer Science…

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of researchers, including Leiden Professor of Molecular Astrophysics Ewine van Dishoeck, has discovered a palette of hydrocarbons in a planet-forming disc around a young, low-mass star. The results confirm that discs around very lightweight…

Stories of resistance in the Second World War are widely covered in Dutch historiography: Hannie Schaft, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, and Professor Cleveringa are some of the best known. But these accounts largely focus on the Dutch domestic perspective. On the other side of the world, a complex colonial…

Graduation MIRD Class of 2024: 'The world is better off with students like this'

The 10th edition of the World Congress of African Linguists (WOCAL), hosted by Leiden University, will be held online from 7 – 12 June. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) researchers give us an insight into how important and special this event actually is.

Professor of cardiology Douwe Atsma (LUMC) looks beyond the traditional boundaries of hospitals and healthcare institutions for solutions to increasing pressure on the current healthcare system.

He has had to accept early retirement due to his military profession, or ‘FLO’ (Functioneel Leeftijdsontslag) as it is more commonly referred to within the Dutch Ministry of Defence, but the words ‘retirement’ or ‘winding down’ do not appear to be part of Frans Osinga's vocabulary. His appointment at…