PhD defence

PhD defence

Can the academic year be structured in such a way to give students, lecturers and researchers a bit more breathing space? To find out, Leiden University is taking part in ‘smarter academic year’ pilots.

Lights out, spotlight on, the LU talks begin. In the small Imperium Theatre, next to the Leidse Schouwburg, students take turns walking up to the round blue carpet. There they have five minutes to present their first LU talk to lecturers, fellow students, and the camera. ‘Extremely useful and instructive’…

PhD defence

PhD defence

PhD defence

PhD defence

Supercomputer ALICE has been expanded, making it even more powerful and faster. This means researchers and students can work with heavier models. From language research to brain activity scans, this expansion is good news for a variety of disciplines. So who gets to work with this prima donna?

Dark matter represents around eighty per cent of the total mass in the Universe. Yet, we still don't really know what it's made of. Astronomer Pavel Mancera Piña is looking for answers. With a Veni grant from NWO and the most advanced telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, he will investigate…

111 years ago, Heike Kamerlingh Onnis liquified helium for the first time, a tour the force that netted him the Nobel prize. It took a laboratory of a size rarely seen. Now, ultracold helium has become a commodity for physics research. In Wolfgang Löffler's lab, it is ready at hand thanks to a coffee…

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…

Seven Leiden researchers have been awarded a prestigious Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, twenty-five bright international students gathered in the Old Observatory to celebrate their graduation of the International Leiden Leadership Programme. A tour of the Sterrewacht and the ‘borrel’ made for a nice completion of the Honours programme.

CERN has approved the construction and operation of SND@LHC, a neutrino detector at the Large Hadron Collider. It's a precursor for SHiP, a detector meant to detect dark matter. Leiden physicist Alexey Boyarsky is one of the initiators of both SHiP and SND@LHC.

Adrian Hamers is researching the way in which celestial bodies orbit each other, now and in the future. This often turns out to be more erratic than you might think. He will defend his PhD dissertation on 21 June.

The life of a fibroblast is heavy, but PhD student Julia Eckert makes it 19.5 times heavier, using the Large Diameter Centrifuge at the ESTEC space research centre in Noordwijk.

Camilo Erlichman recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in International Relations. He introduces himself.

As of 1 June, Serge Fehr has been appointed as Professor Quantum information theory at the Leiden Mathematical Institute (MI). Fehr is employed by Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and as of his appointment works one day a week at the MI. Fehr’s research is focused on quantum cryptology and will…

Five projects with researchers from Leiden University have received a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to build or upgrade existing research facilities.

Mathematician Oliver Nagy still vividly remembers the first time he learned about a random walk. ‘The lecturer told us to imagine a company of drunken students who wander in the streets. At each intersection, they would spin one of them around and all would go in the direction where he or she came to…

Stars orbit black holes while jumping up and down. This is the prediction of a theoretical model developed by Leiden physicist Satish Kumar Saravanan, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity. He defends his PhD thesis on July 7th.

Astronomy departments at Dutch universities is among the top of the world rankings for astronomical institutions. This is the conclusion drawn from a recent evaluation of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) and the astronomy institutions of the University of Amsterdam, the University…

No less than four Leiden research teams have been awarded a grant by NWO. On 27 July NWO honoured 21 applications in the Open Competition ENW-XL. NWO awards the grants to consortia in the exact and natural sciences who are doing unconnected fundamental research that is 'driven by curiosity'.

Successful innovation requires more than technological progress alone. Every new concept must first be firmly anchored into an existing context. At least this is the hypothesis of Dutch classicists, working together in the National Research School in Classical Studies OIKOS. They intend to test this…

The SRON space research institute, Leiden University and the TU Delft are appointing six researchers to jointly carry out space research. The research will focus on exoplanets, the evolution of structure in the Universe and technology for developing new pioneering space instruments.

Should the background of the painting remain blue or be restored to its original gold colour? PhD candidate Liselore Tissen will be using 3D prints and eye-tracking software to answer this question. NICAS is giving her a grant of 18,000 euros to accomplish this.

Have you ever experienced the feeling of awkwardness when attending a party where you didn’t know anybody? Ever felt shy at a party within the first few minutes? While this feeling is labelled loosely as feeling socially anxious, social anxiety disorder goes to a much further extent.

They hurtle along at over a thousand kilometres per second: the fastest stars in the Milky Way. PhD candidate Fraser Evans conducted research into these elusive hypervelocity stars and discovered that they have a lot to teach us, about black holes and supernovae, for example.

Astronomers led by Pieter van Dokkum have discovered a galaxy that barely contains any dark matter, which actually proves that dark matter does indeed exist. The research results will be published this week in Nature.

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.

What is dark matter? How do supermassive black holes form? ‘Primordial’ black holes might hold the answer to these long-standing questions. Leiden and Chinese cosmologists have identified a new way in which these hypothetical objects could be produced just after the Big Bang. Publication in Physical…

Leiden physicists Carlo Beenakker and Bas Hensen receive 35 million euros in a consortium with researchers from QuTech and Delft University of Technology. They will investigate the fundamental limits of quantum physics.

Europe falls behind China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which creates a brain drain for talented students and scientists. A high standard research institute for AI can turn the tide, claims initiator Holger Hoos, Professor of Machine Learning.

Optical projection tomography (OPT) is a tomographic 3D imaging technique used for specimens in the millimetre scale.

Lecture

Developing new drugs is a difficult process. With the aid of artificial intelligence, Pharmaceutical scientist Xuhan Liu has developed methods that can help make drug design cheaper and faster. PhD defence on 15 February.

Lecture

In high school, Tim van Erven read about an artificially intelligent algorithm that could solve mazes. From that moment on, he was sold: ‘There’s something magical about algorithms. With a list of fixed rules you can make them learn the most diverse things.’ This year, he won a Vidi grant, which he…

PhD defence

PhD defence

Lecture

PhD defence

Lecture