We investigate bacteria and fungi to understand their malicious or beneficial impact on food crops and their pathogenic or antibiotic role in human health.

Marta Fiocco, professor in the Mathematical Institute, has received a grant for analysing data on chemotherapy in children suffering from leukaemia. The work involves developing and applying new statistical methods that will help determining the optimal dose of chemotherapy.

The STW project Energy Efficient Computer-Brain Interaction (principal investigator for LIACS: dr. T.P. Stefanov) has been granted. Funding for LIACS: 1 PhD student + travel/equipment budget, project duration: 4 years.

Aart Hendriks, Professor of Health Law at Leiden University, held a lecture on euthanasia on Wednesday 11 December 2019. He was invited by the Madrid section of the Spanish Medical Colleges Organization.

Five Leiden researchers have been nominated as members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).They will be inaugurated on 16 September.

‘Children’s rights are somewhat of a poor relation’, says Professor of Law and Health Mirjam Sombroek-van Doorm. In her inaugural lecture, she will emphasise how more attention needs to be paid to children’s rights in current thinking on law and health.

When children wean off from heavy medication, they often experience withdrawal symptoms. The severity of these symptoms is often difficult to predict. Pharmacologist Bas Goulooze developed a computer model to determine the best weaning strategy for each child. His research has now been published in…

Lecture

We bring science to your home! Join our online study called Biological Motion study!

Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. A study by archaeologists at Leiden University on the use of fire shows that 400,000 years ago knowledge and skills must already have been exchanged…

Ambroise Paré, Thomas Sydenham and Herman Boerhaave: all were great medical innovators in their time. We know far less about the 19th-century Russian physician and scientist Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov. PhD candidate Inge Hendriks researched him in Dutch and Russian archives and collections. She discovered…

PhD defence

Lecture, CIEL Seminars

Professors Simcha Jong (Leiden University) and Rifat Atun (Harvard University) convened an exploratory seminar to discuss challenges for health systems in realising the potential of precision medicine at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies in Cambridge, MA on 17 April 2017.

What determines healthy behavior and how do you promote healthy choices and routines? These are a few questions currently being addressed by Marieke Adriaanse, recently appointed Professor of Behavioral Intervention in Population Health Management at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC).

What is the best method and time to test the effectiveness of medicines? PhD student Rob van Wijk of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) discovered zebrafish larvae are best used in drug research when they are five days old. His findings were published on 15 February in the journal…

Does medicine make patients feel better or worse? We are getting better at predicting this from people’s DNA profiles, says Professor Jesse Swen. ‘It never fails to fascinate me how one DNA base pair can have such a huge effect on treatment with medication and the outcome.’

Vanessa Frodermann, a PhD student at the Biopharmaceutical department of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research, has discovered that arteriosclerosis could be inhibited by cellular therapy. Arteriosclerosis is one of the leading causes of the development of cardiovascular disease. Her PhD defence…

Medicines are becoming increasingly precise and innovative, but at the same time increasingly expensive. With their innovations, it is up to universities to increase competition, thus causing prices to drop. This is what newly appointed Professor of Biomolecular Analysis Hubertus Irth argues. His inaugural…

The universities in the Netherlands and Oxford University Press (OUP) have been unable to reach a new agreement for access to academic journals.

It is time for the international community to put a stop to war crimes – especially against medical personnel, argued international chair of Doctors Without Borders Joanne Liu in her Cleveringa lecture.

On 5 November 2021, Professor Michiel van de Sande of the Department of Orthopedics in the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) delivered his inaugural lecture ‘The Art of Doing and Doing Nothing’. Van de Sande used the opportunity to explore both physical and philosophical aspects of co-decision…

Positive expectations about treatment increase the likelihood of success. The new Center for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies Leiden is therefore promoting research on the placebo effect and offering expertise and training for care providers. At the opening, the founders demonstrated their VR communications…

Next generation immunodermatology (NGID) is a nationwide, large-scale project, funded by a large grant of the Dutch NWO to unravel novel biomarkers for six different skin diseases. These biomarkers will drive a high-tech, patient-centric approach in clinical practice. Health psychologist Sylvia van…

Online teaching has made it much easier for international students to join in our courses. The Leiden minor in Global Health, for instance. Students from Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Malawi logged on and made a valuable contribution with their knowledge, about tropical diseases, for instance.

A new treatment for atherosclerosis showed promising results in isolated cells but proved to be less effective in initial animal tests. Bachelor student Biopharmaceutical Sciences Willemijn van der Heijden aimed to understand why. She investigated whether the formation of a protein layer around the…

Research conducted at Leiden has established that guts-on-chips respond in the same way to aspirin as real human organs do. This is a sign that these model organs are good predictors of the effect of medical drugs on the human body. Publication in Nature Communications on 15 August.

Four promising young researchers from Leiden University have received a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This grant will enable them to gain valuable research experience at top universities abroad.

Three of the four Heineken Young Scientists Awards for 2022 have gone to researchers from Leiden: chronobiologist Laura Kervezee, physicist Jordi Tura i Brugués and health psychologist Liesbeth van Vliet.

Four university medical centres, including the LUMC, are joining forces to increase pandemic preparedness in the Netherlands.

February 8 saw the launch of the Medical Delta ‘Sustainable Hospitals’ Interdisciplinary Thesis Lab. The research projects will touch on different aspects of healthcare. The students hope they will be able to offer practical solutions to make hospitals greener.

The major aim is to determine the psychophysiological responses to stress and stress-management interventions and to examine the role of stress and stress-related psychophysiological mechanisms (e.g., cognitions, behaviors, and physiological stress responses) in both healthy and medical populations.

If you are interested in Life Science and you are looking for a programme with ample opportunities to put together your own study path, our Life Science and Technology programme is the right choice. The programme focuses on societal problems at the molecular and cellular level.

Here you can find the recordings of previous Florence Nightingale Colloquia.

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2022.

The Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) is responsible for the research and education in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences carried out at Leiden University.

A master's degree in Psychology at Leiden University combines theoretical knowledge with academic and professional skills, making you an attractive candidate for many employers.

Science, Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML)

During the 7th annual meeting of the Association for Researchers in Psychology and Health (ARPH) Sylvia van Beugen, from the Health, Medical and Neuropsychology unit, was awarded with the ’Best PhD Thesis Award’ for her dissertation ‘Psychodermatology 2.0: Towards improved assessment and effective digital…

Kidney transplantation used to be an experimental risky procedure, but is now routinely performed by many countries worldwide.

Pancras Hogendoorn, Professor of Pathology and Dean of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), received an honorary doctorate from Semmelweis University in Budapest on Friday 8 October 2019.

How can you tie together scientific research and practical applications? That is exactly what Professor of Translational Data Science Marco Spruit is concerned with, he tells FMT Gezondheid. 'It's about taking socially relevant questions as a starting point for your research.'

Professor Annemieke Aartsma-Rus from Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) has received the Ammodo Science Award for her research into the muscular disease Duchenne.

Cleveringa professor Joanne Liu, international president of Artsen Zonder Grenzen, will give an extra lecture on 24 November. The subject will be how the Ebola crisis was tackled. The Cleveringa lecture itself, on help to refugees, will be held on 25 November.

Robert Ietswaart does research into gene regulation at the famous Harvard Medical School in Boston. He developed an algorithm to better predict whether a candidate medicine is going to produce side effects. He studied mathematics and physics in Leiden, and gained his PhD in computational biology in…

Louis Sicking's Maritime Conflict Management in Atlantic Europe was awarded an 'Internationalisation in the Humanities' grant from NWO. What can we learn from how maritime conflicts were managed in the past?

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…