How is it possible to play a song that is part of the rituals of other people? How to transpose an idea to the stage while maintaining respect for indigenous communities? Are these performances a way of throwing light on these indigenous communities looking for a strategy of decolonization? How is it…

With 8.9 million euros from the Danish National Research Foundation, Aarhus University and Leiden Observatory will establish the Center for Interstellar Catalysis. The centre is led by Aarhus professor Liv Hornekær and aims to find out how and when the building blocks of life formed in the Universe.…

Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite sensitivity of MUSE allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the…

Between the 30th of January and the 2nd of February 2020 around 250 people took part in the II Polish Food Sovereignty Forum.

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…

Why, then, do governments choose to disclose intelligence and what factors shape how they do so?

Martijn Bezemer has been appointed as professor in “Ecology of plant-microbe-insect interactions” within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology from the 1st of September 2016. His main research focus is on aboveground-belowground interactions.

Leiden scientists are the main applicants for five projects that have been awarded a Science Groot grant of up to 3 million euros in the Science Domain. In addition, several Leiden scientists are involved in other projects that have been awarded funding.

PhD candidate Ludwig Hoffmann will spend two years at Harvard University in the US thanks to a Rubicon grant he won on April 11. Using theoretical models he studies biological tissues, for example during morphogenesis. This is the process that causes tissue or organisms to develop their shape. ‘This…

Jeff Fynn-Paul, lecturer at Leiden University’s Institute for History, was recently awarded the European History Quarterly’s 2016 Prize for his article “Occupation, Family, and Inheritance in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona: A Socio-Economic Profile of One of Europe’s Earliest Investing Publics.”

In this project we investigate how the professional development around the theme of inquiry based teaching of teachers from three international schools takes place.

Lecture

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

Roderick Bouman is collection manager of the Leiden Hortus botanicus. He keeps track of which plants there are in the garden, where they come from and makes sure visitors can find the right information about them. ‘We are like a regular museum,’ says Bouman. ‘Except that our objects are alive. That…

Which plant species grow where - and why? In a new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution, an international research team presents the world's first global vegetation database which contains over 1.1 million complete lists of plant species for all terrestrial ecosystems. Leiden professor of Environmental…

This project investigates the causes of the major archaeological change in the period of 40.000-20.000 BC in South Africa.

Knowledge and culture subproject 2:

Lecture

The issue of how to deal with a development such as digitalisation in the public domain raises difficult questions for the municipality: who is responsible and when do you intervene?

Five innovative and excellent teachers have joined the Leiden University Teachers' Academy (LTA). Members of the Academy exchange experiences and share their knowledge and expertise within Leiden University. Frank Takes, assistant professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS)…

On 13 February, Professor Matthias Haentjens spoke at the conference “Proportionality in European Banking Regulation” at the Bank of Greece. This conference was organized by the Greek central bank, in cooperation with the University of Piraeus and the European Banking Institute (EBI).

Contract means contract? Step-in risk, safeguards and resolution

The Middle Paleolithic site of Neumark was first discovered in the 1980’s by German geologist Matthias Thomae.

Episode 1: The Golden Horde in a Global Perspective: Imperial Strategies. This project intends to challenge the conventional way of considering the nomadic state organizations and the role of Nomads in world history.

The genomic DNA of every organism is organized and compacted in order to fit inside the cell. This is achieved by the joint action of numerous architectural proteins that aid in folding the genome. Genome folding is tightly interconnected with transcription, with genes in certain regions being silenced,…

Promotor: A.H. Meijer, Co-promotor: B.E. Snaar-Jagalska

The Leiden University Centre for International Relations (LUCIR) is a multi-disciplinary platform promoting research and education on international relations at Leiden University.

Promotor: Prof.dr. M. Ubbink

This project investigates memorisation strategies that were employed in the fields of painting and calligraphy in imperial China, with a focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Xinrong Ma defended her thesis on 13 February 2018

In surface science there is great effort to move from studying simple, flat model surfaces in vacuum to investigating more complex model catalysts in gas environments (in situ). This thesis gives three examples of such studies using microscopy and spectroscopy.

This grammar presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on fifteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers.

Valérie Pattyn, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, researched

Metal-based prodrugs based on ruthenium(II) polypyridyl complexes have proven to be very suitable for application in both photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photo-activated chemotherapy (PACT).

Doctoral Thesis

Cholesterol influences many pathways, including serving as precursor for adrenal steroidogenesis. Imbalance of cholesterol levels has been implicated in several diseases including cardiovascular diseases and its underlying pathology, atherosclerosis.

Peyman Jafari defended his thesis on 11 October 2018

Stellar feedback is a crucial ingredient in the evolution of galaxies.

According to the amyloid cascade hypothesis, accumulation of beta-amyloid (Aβ) peptides initiates the pathological cascade in Alzheimer's disease (AD).

How did a circle of Soviet artists and writers virtually unknown until perestroika turn into Russia’s most influential contemporary art movement? This book reconstructs the cultural history and canonization of a group of painters and poets known as the Moscow conceptualists, who paradoxically did not…

This is a study of Plateau Shimakonde, a sub-dialect of the Makonde language which is spoken on the Makonde Plateau in northern Mozambique.

Mouse models are commonly used to assess the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins and to investigate the immunological processes leading to antidrug antibodies. The aim of this work was to develop a transgenic (TG) Balb/c mouse model for evaluating the immunogenicity of recombinant human insulin (insulin)…

The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics provides a comprehensive longitudinal overview of the state of the art of academic research on the Dutch political system: its origins and historical development, its key institutions, main fault lines, pivotal processes, and key public policy dynamics. In each…

Serhan Afacan defended his thesis on 23 June 2015

TRIXY is a national Center of Expertise, in which clinical professionals and expert researchers work together to improve knowledge and clinical care for children with X and Y chromosome trisomies.

On the 9th of November Syahril Siddik successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

Cigdem Oguz defended her thesis on 13 June 2018

In the thesis the dynamics of strategies is studied from two perspectives.In the first part of the thesis strategies are considered to be opinions present in a community.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…