An international team with researchers from Leiden revealed how a bacterium repurposed an internal system to control its movements. Movement control is very important in host invasion, which can lead to disease. Publication on 27 April in Nature Communications.

In 2022 Leiden will host the Euroscience Open Forum, Europe's biggest multidisciplinary scientific meeting. Leiden University, the Municipality of Leiden and The Hague Convention Bureau joined forces to organise the conference and bring it to Leiden.

Cut marks on the bones of bears show that people in North-West Europe used bearskins to keep warm 300,000 years ago.

Didi van Trijp started her PhD project at LUCAS in October 2015. Her PhD project is part of A New History of Fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550-1880, a project directed by prof. dr. Paul Smith.

Prof. Julia Sloth-Nielsen has been awarded the Schim van der Loeff grant by the Leiden University Fund to conduct research on unaccompanied migrant children in Zambia.

Reinforcement learning, agents and classification: these are just some of the topics researchers on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning discussed at the BNAIC/BeneLearn conference 2020. It was the first time Leiden University hosted the annually held Belgium Netherlands Artificial Intelligence…

In the online panel discussion of ESOF 2022 ‘The effect of the online world on adolescents’, together with Amy Orben, Professor Eveline Crone, Sterre van Riel, Professor Anne-Laura van Harmelen and Professor Jan Sleutels, Professor Ton Liefaard shared his research on adolescents and the online world…

On Saturday 9 March 2019, Dr. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga got his first publication for his Marie Skłodowska Curie project on the Legal and Ethical Aspects of Healthcare Robot Technology.

Native women are invisible in Mexican society. This is the conclusion Barbara Ortiz draws in her dissertation. PhD defence on 23 February.

David van Bodegom, Professor of Vitality in an Ageing Population, will give his inaugural lecture on 11 November, also titled Vitality in an Ageing Population. According to Van Bodegom the key to healthy ageing is the lived environment. In the fight against lifestyle-related conditions, he therefore…

Two events on Music and the Brain will be held in Leiden later this month.

Dr Erik Kwakkel, Leiden specialist on medieval manuscripts, has one foot in the world of medieval book production and the other firmly planted in the modern environment of social media. He is co-editor of Author, Reader, Book aimed at specialists in medieval authorship, and tweets daily to bring the…

2017 was the Leiden Asia Year. Leiden has had connections with Asia and built up extensive knowledge of the continent over many centuries. This Leiden-Asia link has been in the spotlight for the past year.

Early July was the graduation ceremony of the Leiden Leadership Programme,: a moment to reflect and celebrate the outcomes of eight months’ hard work. Leiden’s Marekerk was filled with colourful music and some wise pieces of advice: ‘Find the path that suits you best.’

Biologists today have to be able to work with big data. Data analysis skills should be taught from the start of the degree programme, or - even better - in secondary school. This is the message of Vera van Noort, new Professor of Computational Biology. Inaugural lecture 22 January.

The Dutch X-omics Initiative has received seventeen million euros from NWO as part of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Infrastructure. Leiden University’s metabolomics research led by Thomas Hankemeier is one of the participators.

Experts from several disciplines have raised concerns about the use of seemingly precise models to guide policies in matters as complex as the current Covid-19 pandemic. 22 scholars wrote down five principles on how to responsibly use scientific models. This comment was published in Nature on 24 June…

The master programme was officially opened by H.E. Kees Klompenhouwer – the Ambassador of the Netherlands to the Czech Republic. During his lecture, entitled “Traveling through Europe’s darkness and daylight – A geopolitical Odyssey”, Ambassador Klompenhouwer shared valuable insights on the history…

There are miniaturisation beams, microrobots, and ice skaters who suddenly drop into a hole in the ice. Students of the local MBO Rijnland let their imagination run free while animating Leiden physics research. The result is eleven surprising and very diverse science animations.

Neilabh Sinha was awarded a subsidy from NWO Promoties in de Geesteswetenschappen and started as a PhD candidate at the Institute for History in September. He introduces himself.

As of 1 June, Leiden University has appointed Sense Jan van der Molen as Professor Physics of Condensed matter. He investigates the unique electronic properties that arise when atomic thin layers are stacked on top of each other into new materials.

Sophia Hendrikx started her PhD project at LUCAS in March 2015...

Studying languages enables you to unearth a lot of valuable information about humans: it reveals our history and explains cultural differences and it even illustrates the process of learning new information. The University is sharing its knowledge of and passion for languages in various new ways, including…

Confronting your own biases, students of the course ‘Adults and Children in a Polarising World’ are not afraid to do exactly that. ‘The fact that my expectations of the interview were not in line with the outcome, was very informative.’

Leiden University celebrated the annual prize ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC) on 8 November with lectures by leading scientists in a festively decorated Pieterskerk.

This international conference, held in Leiden form 22 to 24 May 2017, focused on adat law in Indonesia a century after the Adat Law Foundation (Adatrechtstichting) was set up in Leiden by the famous professors Van Vollenhoven and Snouck Hurgronje. In the decades that followed the Adat Law Foundation…

The Global Summit, which took place from 12-16 January 2021, is an initiative by Richard Albert, the William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, Director of Constitutional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Founder & Director of the International Forum on the Future…

Individual traders should be at the forefront of the study of early modern world trade rather than institutions such as states and companies, argues Professor of Global Economic Networks Cátia Antunes. Inaugural lecture on 9 June.

For the first time, research has been conducted on how the health of detained persons prior to their detention differs from that of non-detainees and to what extent health problems change over the period: from before and after their detention.

How do practice and theory reinforce one another in neuroscience? Professor Birte Forstmann’s inaugural lecture on 2 October will be about building interdisciplinary bridges between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive models. Her approach may lead to brain research with fewer side-effects for patie…

Matthias Flór receives the KHMW Graduation Prize in Theoretical Physics for his master's thesis. His research on exotic superconductors at Leiden University and TU Delft struck a chord with the jury. The jury unanimously chose to award Flór noting that ‘he demonstrated impressive technical abilities…

Jaap van den Herik was appointed Officer in the Order of Orange Nassau on 8 October on his retirement as professor of Law and Information Technology.

On 1 February 2014 the second issue of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference, titled 'Death: Ritual, Representation and Remembrance', was published.

The Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) is an annual world-leading multidisciplinary conference that takes place in January in Brussels. In January 2017, eLaw, the Centre for Law and Digital Technologies of Leiden University, participated in the CPDP conference as one of the…

In the CSM-elective ‘Governance of Crime and Social Disorder,’ Dr. Elke Devroe challenges her students to engage in an interactive group role-play on various themes related to the governance of crime. During this exercise, each group of students brings to life a sensitive security topic – such as mass…

On the occasion of Euroscience Open Forum 2022, Professor Attiya Waris (Director of Research and Enterprise and Professor of Fiscal Law and Policy in Eastern Africa, University of Nairobi, Kenya), Professor Irma Mosquera Valderrama (Professor of Global Tax Governance, Lead Researcher GLOBTAXGOV ERC…

Packages of DNA strands containing silver, measuring just two or three nanometres in size. Leiden physicists Donny de Bruin and Dirk Bouwmeester create these packages, which can enter living cells on their own. They then activate the silver with light, causing the cells to break down. This could, in…

Recently, Jaap van den Herik, professor emeritus Law and IT, was interviewed by the BNVKI (Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence).

Editors: Irene Hadiprayitno, Elena Burgos Martinez, and Rizal Shidiq (Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands)

If you know a crime is about to occur, should you be able to prevent it before it has even happened? This was one of the questions that was posed in light of predictive policing as a form of mass surveillance during the debate in the elective Governance of Crime and Social Disorder class of the Crisis…

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, a world-wide effort by the botanist and plant protection community, is making considerable progress in protecting plant diversity around the world, a new report says. The Hortus botanicus Leiden is one of the partners of the project.

Our solar system probably evolved in the same way as most of the other planetary systems around us. This has been shown by German-Austrian-Dutch research on more than 870 planet-forming disks in the Orion cloud A. The five researchers, including three from the Leiden Observatory, published their findings…

Three of our researchers have been awarded a certificate for receiving enough downloads to be in the top 10% of papers in 2022

On Thursday 10 November, the GTGC organized a research seminar. During this seminar Saori Katada presented her paper on Regional Approach to Financial Statecraft: Japan and India in the Face of Rising China.

The winner of the Leiden University Thesis Prize has made an original and substantial contribution to argumentation theory. This is what Annetje Ottow, President of the Executive Board and member of the LUF board, said at the online ceremony for the University’s thesis prizes. The winner of the first…

To give a better idea of the research at Leiden University, a new website has been launched that lists the University’s institutes together with the disciplines that they cover. But the institutes also work together intensively.

On May 15th, from 15.15 to 17.00 in the Vossiusroom, Leiden University Libraries will host a program on web-archiving and digital archives of Chinese communities in the Netherlands and Indonesia.

Are maps objective or do they convey hidden messages that you would miss at first glance? A map is always a simplification of reality. Mapmakers reduce, distort and select. This allows the reader to be guided literally and figuratively. Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Museum Volkenkunde jointly…

Restructuring of corporate groups was discussed at the joint conference of the European Law Institute (ELI) and the Business & Liability Research Network of Leiden University took place in Leiden (the Netherlands). During this conference, developments at both the national and European levels were discussed.…