Today, ESA’s Gaia mission releases its new treasure trove of data about our home galaxy. Astronomers, led by the Leiden astronomer Anthony Brown, describe strange ‘starquakes’, stellar DNA, asymmetric motions and other fascinating insights in this most detailed Milky Way survey to date.

‘A university is a slow-moving institution, which is in many ways a good thing,' commented student Josephine Rook at the opening of the Leiden University Green Office on 27 September in the Hortus botanicus. ‘Sustainability is not about following the latest trends, but about making structural improv…

Leiden University is celebrating its 450th anniversary in 2025 with a feast for the eyes, ears and spirit. The anniversary year opens with an extra special Dies Natalis on 7 February. Highlights includes an alumni festival, three exhibitions and a canal concert.

Environmental Humanities LU Talk

Exhibition

Exhibition

Festival, Kennis door de Wijken

Study information

Simon Portegies Zwart, professor of Computational Astrophysics, uses computers to simulate the evolution of stars. We speak with him about his field and about the challenges of working with huge amounts of complex data.

Radio telescope LOFAR maps the sky. It produces incredibly detailed images of the universe - and vast amounts of data. Huub Röttgering, director of the Leiden Observatory, talks about the challenges of working with those enormous datasets.

One day you feel inspired by a field trip, the next you are a speaker at TEDxLeidenUniversity. It happened to International Relations student Alexia. How did she end up on stage – and why did she want to? Alexia shares her story with us. ‘I was given hope, and I wanted to share it with others.’

With a self-converted red camper van, biologists and twin brothers Kevin and Marvin Groen go on a nature adventure in Eastern Europe. Together, they search for wild animals, beautiful nature and places to sport. From a long search for a bear in the Slovakian wilderness to the discovery that pelicans…

The genetic code of the new coronavirus has been found: it is closely related to the SARS virus from 2003. Professor of Molecular Virology, Eric Snijder, has been researching coronaviruses for years. We asked him a few questions about the outbreak. ‘It’s still unclear whether this new virus is more…

The Sustainable 100 is an initiative by Dutch newspaper Trouw, consisting of a list of the top 100 sustainable civil initiatives. In October of 2020, the Jonge Klimaatbeweging (Youth Climate Movement NL) became the first youth organization to win first prize. An interview with LUC Alumna and Board Member…

The Sustainable City Lab The Hague will be a hub that connects organisations in The Hague that work on sustainability with the research and teaching at Leiden University. ‘We’re going to set to work on complex sustainability challenges in our own backyard,’ says project leader Eefje Cuppen.

Seven Leiden professors have been elected as members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In total 23 new members will be inaugurated on Monday 13 September.

For centuries, astronomers have studied the universe by collecting light signals. Since 2015, the confirmation of an important prediction of Einstein allows us to explore the universe in a new way: through gravitational wave radiation. Astronomy PhD candidate Valeriya Korol proposes to use these gravitational…

Four thousand visitors immersed themselves in art and science during Leiden's Night of Art and Science on 17 September. They could choose from dozens of lectures, experiments, interactive events and a lot of art.

Sixteen researchers at Leiden University have received a Veni award from the Netherlands Organisation for Academic Research (NWO). This award offers promising young researchers the opportunity to further develop their ideas for a period of three years.

Markus Kornprobst writes about managing international crises.

The orbits of 27 stars orbiting closely around the black hole at the center of our Milky Way are very chaotic. As a result, researchers cannot predict with confidence where they will be in about 462 years. ‘That is astonishingly short,’ says astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart who collaborated on the r…

In a festive and intimate award ceremony, plant scientist Omid Karami received the first edition of the Krijn Rietveld Memorial Innovation Award out of the hands of Wim Klop, Director of the Biotechnology Center at DSM. Several speakers spoke about Krijn Rietveld and why Karami deserves the prize that…

After 25 years, December will finally see the launch of the long-awaited James Webb space telescope. Leiden astronomers are watching with great excitement: not only were they involved in the construction of important instruments on board, the telescope will also reveal many new secrets of the universe,…

In The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, environmental scientist Paul Behrens describes both hopeful and pessimistic scenarios for our future and that of our planet. With the book soon to be published, Behrens talks about its content and the writing process itself.

‘There is often a strong emphasis on the differences with Asia when actually there are so many similarities on all sorts of levels. Parents in Asia deliberate just as much about which school they should send their child to,’ says Frank Pieke, Professor of Modern China Studies. The opening conference…

No fewer than seven Leiden FWN students received a Young Talent Award from the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences on Monday, 29 November. Mark van den Bosch and Karlijn Kruiswijk won a graduation prize, a group of young astronomers won the ET Outreach Award and the other five students each received an…

From Wednesday 13 July 2022, for four days, Leiden is at the epicentre of European science, as it hosts Europe's largest interdisciplinary conference, the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF). We interviewed Marja Spierenburg, Professor in the Anthropology of Sustainability and Livelihood. In addition to being…

In March 2022, a considerable number of non-Western countries abstained (35) or voted against (5) a resolution deploring Russia’s aggression, its violation of the UN Charter and demanding the withdrawal of its forces from the territory of Ukraine. Even fewer countries subsequently actively supported…

Leiden University celebrated its 444th anniversary with a historical procession on 8 February. It celebrated this year’s Dies Natalis in time-honoured fashion with a ceremony in the Pieterskerk, but broke with tradition by sending professors out to primary schools.

From studying molecules in the blood of corona patients to developing a new concept for vaccines. The Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) has transformed many ongoing projects into Covid research projects. Hubertus Irth, scientific director of LACDR, talks about the role of his institute…

How has evolution shaped our curiosity? And how does that curiosity ensure that we now have the technological ability to discover whether we are alone in the universe? This was all covered during the celebration of Leiden University’s 449th Dies Natalis.

What does the Dutch Ministry of Defence do to fight climate change? And what is Alumna Charlotte van Gemeren’s Role in this? We spoke with Charlotte (class of 2016) and asked her about what’s it like to do a traineeship for the Dutch Government (and how to get in), the lessons learned at International…

ESA’s space telescope Gaia, which maps the Milky Way, completes its active phase of scanning the sky on 15 January. Over the past decade, Gaia has made more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other cosmic objects. ‘Gaia is already the discovery machine of the decade,’ Leiden…

University ceremony

PhD defence

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Lunch Series '23/'24

Lecture, Symposium

Lecture

Alumni event

Book Talk

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

Should Leiden University cut its ties with the fossil fuel industry forthwith? This was the main question in a debate between students and staff. The answer was clearer for some than for others.

The first full-colour images of the cosmos from ESA's space telescope Euclid were presented today. Never before has a telescope been able to take such crystal-clear astronomical images of such a large part of the sky and so far into the deep universe. The five images illustrate Euclid's full potential;…