A 35-year-old uranium crystal will not disclose its secret: what causes a dramatic phase transition at 17.5 Kelvin? Thanks to a new artificial intelligence approach, half of the possible explanations are excluded, but the definitive answer remains to be found. 'It is very frustrating', says physicist…

PhD defence

Lecture, Kick-off

Lecture, CMGI Brown Bag Seminar

Lecture

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy regularly publishes reviews of recent books within the field of diplomacy and global affairs.

What are the patterns and processes of human mobility in the pre-colonial circum-Caribbean as revealed by burial populations and what are the underlying motives and socio-cultural principles on both micro- and macro-scales?

Speech Prosody 2024 includes seven special sessions. When making a submission, authors are asked to indicate whether they want their paper to be considered for a special session. You can find descriptions of each below.

The receptor nomenclature committee of IUPHAR, the International Union of Pharmacology, has several subgroups. Among these are a few that our division is involved in, those for adenosine, nicotinic acid, and GnRH receptors.

This project aims to revisit the relationship between the European cultural agenda and the local identity formation process, and social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine, when the British ruled via the Mandate. What was the role of culture in European policies…

This project studies travel writing about the Dutch East Indies written between 1800 and the end of the Second World War. By analyzing both Dutch travel texts and Indigenous travel texts in Javanese and Malay, it presents a new, double-voiced perspective on (the historiography of) the Dutch colonial…

Commission on Legal Pluralism - Keynote Lecture

On September 13 and 14 Utrecht University, Leiden University and Maastricht University are organizing a two day conference on Procedural rights in criminal proceedings in the European Union, offering a venue for practitioners and young scholars to exchange experiences and ideas on this subject matter.…

Using speech analysis to resolve crimes. That's what Meike de Boer (26) is aiming to do with her PhD research. 'By analysing how a person pronounces

This is a good time for it to happen, in the opinion of Professor of Fatherlands History, Henk te Velde. The abdication of Queen Beatrix is a good starting point for celebrating 200 years of the Dutch monarchy, in 2013. Te Velde is a member of the National Committee for 200 Years of Monarchy: 'By standing…

Each year Dutch women’s magazine VIVA draws up a list of creative and enterprising women. This year our alumna and Professor of Law and Society Maartje van der Woude has been nominated. The award ceremony is on 15 November.

Former PhD student Cameron Mackie will been awarded not one, but two dissertation prizes for his thesis on the aromatic universe. His work could provide us with a virtual sniff of space. ‘These molecules in space likely smell like a big charcoal grill!’

Rather than one key and one strong lock, biology often uses tens or hundreds of weaker links to bind parts together, such as cells membranes. This allows for selectivity and also reversibility: the binding can also be undone. Researchers first caught this phenomenon using spheres or colloids, and published…

Today, March 15 2016, the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship were formally published in the Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Data.

'We are very happy with this recognition! The great thing about this prize is that it celebrates team effort', Joanne Mouthaan responds to the Casimir Prize for the education project 'E-learning Suicide Prevention'. Colleague Maartje Schoorl calls the prize the icing on the cake of good education in…

Research Master’s students in Archaeology Rosa Seepma and Aida Tadesse received an Incentive Prize from the Dutch Association for Physical Anthropology (NVFA). They were awarded this honor for their ongoing study on the human osteology collection at the Allard Pierson Museum.

For the fifth year in succession, on the foundation day of the university, Leiden professors taught a lesson at primary schools as part of the ‘Meet the Professor’ programme.

Not experiments and lab coats, but computers and artificial intelligence: this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the inventors of the groundbreaking AI model, AlphaFold. This programme accurately predicts protein structures based on their genetic code—a crucial step in understanding biological…

Good news for international collaboration: the EU’s International Credit Mobility programme has awarded 163 grants to students and researchers from Leiden University and partner universities in 19 countries outside the EU. The grants are for 19 projects that have arisen from existing partnerships.

Leiden University will be conferring three honorary doctorates in its special anniversary year. They will be awarded to Eliot Higgins, truth finder and founder of Bellingcat, Bonnie Honig, expert in feminist theory and legal theory, and Kelly Chibale, professor of organic chemistry, who works on prevention…

How can chimpanzees, so closely related to humans, have almost no sense of rhythm? ‘The best students ever’ and behavioural biologist Michelle Spierings demonstrated that chimps can actually drum and move rhythmically—each following their own unique beat.

Children, cardiac surgery patients or people who are obese. How can we improve the dosing of painkillers for these patients? Hospital pharmacist Sjoerd de Hoogd of the St. Antonius Hospital in Utrecht investigated this. He combined data from the hospital with the knowledge and expertise of the Leiden…

A month ago it was Marc Baggelaar, and now Hans Kistemaker too has obtained his PhD cum laude at the Leiden Institute for Chemistry (LIC). ‘He has made ground-breaking contributions to the world of protein modification,’ says PhD supervisor Gijs van der Marel. Kistemaker obtained his PhD on 11 May…

For many high school students, mathematical formulas are nothing more than abracadabra. Didactic and mathematics teacher Peter Kop wants to change this. For his PhD research, he devised a new series of lessons full of drawing assignments that learn students to assign more meaning to the formulas. Kop:…

The Aernout van Lynden Global Citizenship Award award is a recognition given by the LUC community. Each year a student who has demonstrated the qualities of active engagement, responsive and responsible participation in civic and/or community building, within and/or beyond LUC is presented with the…

How do migrants navigate key life events? Researchers from the Living on the Other Side project looked at the experiences of migrants who have settled in Morocco. During a recent tour through Morocco, they shared their insights with respondents and fellow researchers.

Leiden Professor of Museums, Collections and Society, Pieter ter Keurs, conducts research into the provenance of museum collections. This is important for the return of heritage. But Ter Keurs is interested in why people collect at all.

The cultural linguistic minority group of deaf people who communicate using sign language systematically experiences limited access to fundamental rights. Linguist Joni Oyserman identified this problem and has received a Meijers grant to fund her investigation.

Wouter Verschoof-van der Vaart is refining an artificial intelligence system that can detect and classify archaeological objects on digital images. Such a system is desperately needed because human archaeologists around the world are being flooded with data.

Nine talented Leiden researchers have been awarded a Vidi subsidy by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Vidis are intended for researchers with several years of research experience who want to set up or expand their own line of research.

The announcement by US President Donald Trump on 9 March in response to the invitation for a summit meeting with the North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un came as a big surprise. Media analyses vary from being very positive to almost cynically negative. However, according to researcher on Korea Koen…

Leiden University, Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam are important players in the world of self-learning machines that can work together with people. Moreover, the three have close ties in the field of AI and hope to further strengthen this collaboration in the future.…

Psychiatrists in Morocco can't ignore Islam. Driss Moussaoui was one of the first modern psychiatrists in this North African country. He delivered the LUCIS annual lecture on 12 April.

In a new series we talk to past and present students who were the first in their family to go to university. In this first instalment: novelist and columnist Christiaan Weijts (1976). ‘I always felt as though someone would tap me on my shoulder once they’d discovered my clandestine presence.’

On 28 September the famous chemists Carolyn Bertozzi visited Leiden University to speak at the LED3 seminar. Just one week later, she was announced winner the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Leiden chemists Sebastian Pomplun and Hermen Overkleeft are fan: ‘We are extremely honoured to have hosted this…

The 2015 and 2018 Personnel monitors show that maintaining a good work balance remains difficult for staff at the Faculty of Humanities. Lecturer and researcher Judith Naeff and holder of the operational management portfolio Suzy Sirks have joined the Work Balance Steering Committee to examine the…

Economic anthropologist Erik Bähre does research on the morality of insurance. In his latest ethnography ‘Ironies of Solidarity’ Bähre explores how the South African insurance market expanded.

The Hague Court of Arbitration for Aviation (The Hague CAA) successfully marked its official debut conference with the support of partners, which include Leiden University's International Institute of Air and Space Law (IIASL), the Netherlands Arbitration Institute (NAI), and the Municipality of The…

In an open letter, 450 leading European researchers from 33 countries have urged European and national governments to strongly cooperate on artificial intelligence , regardless of the Brexit. Leiden professor Holger Hoos is one of the initiators.

We are saddened by the news of the unexpected passing of prof.dr. Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld on 28 July 2021.

After working full-time for twenty-four years, Wendy Tonks decided to enrol in the executive master's in Cyber Security. She now proudly reflects on her time in the programme after receiving a ten for her thesis and graduating summa cum laude. ‘I could not believe it when I got my grade.’

Natalia Grincheva (2020). Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8153-6999-8, 164 pp., £27.99 (paperback).

On Tuesday 24 April 2018, Nick Clegg, who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, gave a guestlecture to first year students public administration about the profound dilemmas on Brexit. The lecture was part of a political science course within the Bachelor Public Administration of Leiden…