A new government, conflicts around the world and obviously a lot of science: these are the five stories about Leiden University that you enjoyed reading in 2024.

How do you progress from an immense gas cloud somewhere in the universe to a star with planets? Research by Astronomy PhD student Martijn van Gelder sheds more light on the earliest phases of this process. He will receive his doctorate on November 24th.

Organisation

Small workshop

Simulations of galaxy formation provide much more information about galaxies than a telescope. Simulations have been improving significantly in recent years. Astronomer Evgenii Chaikin made such a significant contribution to this field that he graduated with honours on February 27th.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Northern-Netherlandish artists drew outdoors to train their hands and eyes, and to record landscapes and nature. In her inaugural lecture on 21 March 2022, Yvonne Bleyerveld, Professor by Special Appointment of Art on Paper and Parchment, draws our attention to a…

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

An international team of scientists, including Xander Tielens of Leiden Observatory, has used space telescope Hubble and the ALMA observatory to show that UV radiation from massive stars can prevent planets from forming. The researchers publish their findings on 1 March in the journal Science.

Arts and culture, Stekjesmarkt

Arts and culture, Stekjesmarkt

Communication, Outreach

PhD defence

The jade vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys) is flowering at the Hortus botanicus in Leiden. The plant started producing multiple flower clusters three weeks ago and the first ones are now in full bloom.

Arts and culture, Stekjesmarkt

Via Office 365 and OneDrive you can work from all kinds of places and on different devices without having to use Remote Workplace.

Via Office 365 and OneDrive you can work from all kinds of places and on different devices without having to use Remote Workplace.

Lecture + Q&A

The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) has appointed Jos Raaijmakers, professor of Microbial Interactions and diversity, as a new scientific member.

Organisation

You can request a shared mailbox if you want to share an e-mail account with multiple colleagues.

Whether a microbe is beneficial or harmful to a plant can now be predicted with high accuracy thanks to bacLIFE. This bioinformatic tool with an intuitive interface makes it much easier to unlock the secrets of bacterial genomes. A group of Leiden biologists presented it in Nature Communications.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of researchers, including Leiden Professor of Molecular Astrophysics Ewine van Dishoeck, has discovered a palette of hydrocarbons in a planet-forming disc around a young, low-mass star. The results confirm that discs around very lightweight…

PhD defence

Lecture, Research Seminar

Botanisch filosoof Norbert Peeters vertelt over hoe mensen omgaan met planten in het algemeen, en met onkruid in het bijzonder.

The discovery of a planet far too large for its sun defies models about the formation of solar systems and planets. In a paper in Science, researchers, including Yamila Miguel of Leiden Observatory, report the discovery of a planet more than 13 times heavier than Earth orbiting the ultracool dwarf star…

Lecture

Estimate the amount of data you have created and what will be added?

Exhibition

You can quite simply make videos with your webcam or smartphone. This format is used mostly when you want to give a quick response or update.

ICT, Security

If you wish to share files with colleagues within or outside the university, you can save these files in the cloud. You can do this with Office 365 or OneDrive. If your files are too large to be send by e-mail, you can use SURFfilesender.

Education, Finance, Research

Course, Intervision

Thijs Bosker, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences at Leiden University College (LUC) and the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), has received funding as part of a large consortium to study the impacts of microplastics on agricultural soils. The project will receive 7 million euro of…

PhD defence