Deep-brain stimulation (DBS) is the most promising surgical treatment for movement and neuropsychiatric disorders, but is accompanied by unwanted side effects. Birte Forstmann, professor by special appointment, has been awarded a ERC Proof of Concept Grant to create an atlas of the human deep brain…

Lecture

Finds uncovered in the east of Germany show that Neanderthals stored and preserved vast amounts of meat and/or temporarily aggregated in larger groups to exploit the spoils

Leiden University Press publishes academic books and journals, primarily in the field of humanities and social and behavioural sciences. The press focuses on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, History (Global, Military, Environmental) Archaeology, Asian Studies, Environmental Studies, Literary Studies,…

Fancy seeing how your job is done at a university abroad? Project Managers Christina Schlüpen and Jeannette de Wolf from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry did just that. They both spent a week shadowing a European colleague: one in Bologna and the other in Berlin. This was through the Una Europe alliance,…

Alternative demonstrations were held in Leiden and The Hague on Thursday 14 November after the national protest in Utrecht was cancelled. Leiden University supports these protests, which were organised by WOinActie. Read our live blog of the demonstrations.

Social

An exhibition at Oude UB takes visitors to the historical Silk Road. Old maps, clothes and jewellery reflect the rich heritage of the cities of Central Asia and their inhabitants.

On March 16 students and alumni of the Advanced LLM in European and International Human Rights Law were brought together in an online Zoom event organized by our programme coordinator, Mahshid Alizadeh, and head of the LLM, Rick Lawson.

'I hope to contribute to a better understanding of social dilemmas we constantly face, like those that arise with climate change or the current pandemic,' says social and organisational psychologist Jörg Gross in an interview on his Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC).

Organisation

Is aviation on a one-way journey or a round trip? That is the question Steven Truxal will answer in his inaugural lecture From Disruption to Innovation in Air and Space: Legal Solutions for a Sustainable Future on Monday 15 November. This professor of air and space law is positive. That’s one thing…

Minister Dijkgraaf (Education, Culture and Science) has appointed Ionica Smeets and Alex Verkade as coordinators of a new national centre for science communication. The centre will foster a dialogue between researches and society and will gather and share expertise to make science communication more…

Leiden criminologists have co-developed an artificial intelligence technology that tracks firearms incidents by scanning over 350 news sources.

The Executive Board appointed Sanneke Kuipers as full professor effective January 1, 2022. Her chair is Crisis Governance. She combines this chair with her position as education director of ISGA, the Institute of Security and Global Affairs. A conversation about working 24/7 in crisis management, her…

Following our Leiden Brussels Alumni Event, I (external officer M. Blaauw, ed.) met our very own Leiden Law alumna Helena-Loutas Paraskeva. An Australian who works for the European Commission. Interesting, how did she get this job, what does she do and how did her Master in Leiden affect or influence…

The sixth specialisation of the Master Crisis and Security Management (CSM) will start in September 2023: Governance of Violence. Coordinator of this track is Professor Marieke Liem. She talks about the how and why of this new track and the importance of research in and knowledge of the nature and scope…

We spoke with Mathilde Witkam about her research as a dual PhD candidate at the Dual PhD Centre. Her dissertation is about the effect of open government on public trust. Mathilde: ‘Trust in government ensures that people are more honest in their tax returns; less control saves time and money.’

When we think of unethical medical experiments, we tend to think first of Nazi Germany. What is less well known is that experiments were also carried out in colonised areas without the explicit consent of the test subject. University lecturer Fenneke Sysling has received a European grant to research…

Professor Peter Bisschop has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. He will invest the 2.5 million euros in his research into puranas: ancient texts, commonly written in Sanskrit, that are up to fifteen hundred years old.

Two research groups involving Leiden University have been awarded a major European grant, the ERC Synergy Grant. This for research on the development of membranes that can clean water and purify medical drugs and research on the biological clock in certain bacteria.

A team of three Leiden tax law students have reached the finals of the most prestigious worldwide moot court competition in the field of international and European tax law.

Alumnus Ben Smulders has worked for the European Commission for the past 33 years. ‘The discipline and depth that I experienced during my student days has helped me through various stages of my professional career.’

From March 1, Alenka Prinčič will be the new Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University Libraries. Her expertise in the areas of Research Support, Research Infrastructures and Open Publishing as well as her longstanding experience as a manager are excellent starting points…

Leiden University, together with the Open University and Universities of the Netherlands, will take up residence in the Spui building at Grote Marktstraat 48-50/Spui 3 in downtown The Hague from 2025. The partners signed the leases on 7 November.

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…

Finance, Research

Francesco Ragazzi (Institute of Political Science), Julian Ross (Center for the Arts in Society) and Mark Westmoreland (Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology) set up the interdisciplinary research centre ReCNTR.

Educational innovation provides both opportunities and challenges for lecturers. How do you put your innovative ideas into practice or how do you choose the right learning resources for your teaching? From now on, lecturers can go for support and inspiration to the new Leiden Learning & Innovation Centre…

Online services are stored on servers in data centres. Remko Fermin researched methods to make the memory in data centres more energy efficient.

Over 20,000 students, lecturers, administrators, support staff and many others protested on 25 November against the plans to make billions of cuts to higher education. Students and staff from Leiden University also travelled to The Hague to voice their objections to the disastrous plans.

As a student, university lecturer Berthe Jansen fell under the spell of the Van Manen collection: a collection full of Tibetan writings and objects. A €1.5 million grant now makes it possible to take a really close look at it. 'There is still so much to do and discover.'

One of the EU's most heralded weapons against tax avoidance and evasion falls prey to political whims, is applied arbitrarily, and lacks transparency, according to tax observers and lawmakers.

Hwæt! You've heard of the adventures of the mighty Beowulf. You've heard of the brave folk standing beside him, and the awe-inspiring foes standing against him. But where their legend still lives, their tale ended long ago... Let us begin a new saga, let us find new heroes, weave a new story - by the…

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

Rutger Leukfeldt has been appointed endowed Professor of Governing Cybercrime at the faculties of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA) and Leiden Law School. Leukfeldt: 'It’s great that the two faculties are joining forces at a time when we’re faced with enormous challenges in the field of cybercrim…

In an interview with Sveriges Radio, Sweden’s national radio station, Jorrit Rijpma, Professor of European Law, spoke about European legislation concerning migration.

Physicist Remko Fermin from Leiden University was awarded a Rubicon grant from NWO. He will use it to study superconducting diodes that could contribute to reducing the CO2 emission of data centres.

Lecture, Seminar

The starting point of human-induced landscape changes has been under permanent debate. It is widely accepted that the emergence of agriculture strongly increased human impact on their environments. However, foragers can and do actively transform land cover and ecosystems. Ethnographic observations,…

A major grant for research into machine learning algorithms for quantum computers. With this ERC Consolidator grant, Vedran Dunjko and his colleagues hope to discover which real-world problems a quantum computer can solve faster than a normal one.