Dutch researchers have developed a new tool to label DNA for studying chromosomes in live cells. The tool is non-invasive and can be applied in culture but also in living organisms, such as zebrafish embryos. The team published their findings in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

As far as Daniël Pijnappels, Professor of Cellular Electrophysiology, is concerned, both researching and inventing are essential for a scientist.

Lots of employees celebrated special successes in 2023. Here’s a list of all those scholarships, awards and honours.

Epithelial cells play a crucial role in the lungs. PhD student Ying Wang researched the effects of cigarette smoke and viruses such as COVID-19 on these epithelial cells. ‘We hope to reduce the risk of pandemics in the future.’

Ineke Sluiter, Professor of Greek Language and Literature, has been awarded the Academy Professor Prize by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). According to the jury, Sluiter is exceptional in her ability to connect issues from antiquity with the broad themes of the present day…

Seven Leiden researchers have been awarded a prestigious Vici grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

History can be found in utensils and in interviews with ordinary citizens. ‘With the reconstruction of everyday life, an anthropological approach works better,’ thinks historian Jan-Bart Gewald. Inaugural lecture on 6 June.

Three young researchers from Leiden have received an Early Career Award from KNAW for their innovative research. The award consists of the sum of 15,000 euros and an artwork.

Researchers at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) have managed to culture human heart muscle cells on a massive scale. This is an exceptional achievement because it is very difficult to replicate heart muscle cells outside the body. Using a special technique, the researchers have now created…

Three lecturers from Leiden University have been awarded a 100,000-euro Comenius Teaching Fellowship within the scope of the Senior Fellows programme. The grant will enable them and their project teams to carry out their own teaching innovation project.

On January 29th, the first annual event of the SUPER MoRRI project will be held in the Lipsius building in Leiden and will be thematically organized around engaging the public with research and innovation. Registration is free; hope to see you there!

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Leiden University and Philips are jointly receiving over 2 million euros from NWO to set up an artificial intelligence (AI) lab. The aim of this lab is to accelerate and improve MRI scans with AI. This is great for patients, and it helps make MRI more accessi…

Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Oncode have created a tracking system that can reveal how often cells have divided. This allowed them to find a yet undiscovered population of immune cells: young memory cells that behave like stem cells.…

Anna Derksen is a PhD candidate at Leiden University Institute for History. Her thesis examines the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) with a focus on the Nordic countries and their contributions to social and developmental policies and international rights agendas.

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

Physicists, including Leiden researcher, Sanli Faes, have devised a new technique for studying processes at microscale rapidly and extremely precisely. This new method will make it easier to develop antiviral medication. And it doesn’t stop there. Publication in ACS Nano.

There are effective treatments for people with autism, says Wouter Staal, professor of Autism Spectrum Disorders, in his inaugural lecture on 4 May. However, it is not yet clear which treatment is most effective for which individual.

Researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) are working on the first diagnostic test for leprosy that can be used outside a laboratory. This will not only reliably diagnose leprosy, but also be cheap and easy to use. Leprosy mainly occurs in low-income countries. A double challenge…

Publication by: Anouk Wezel, Sabine Welten, Wida Razawy, Max Lagraauw, Margreet de Vries, Eveline Goossens, Martin Boonstra, Jaap Hamming, Ekambar Kandimalla, Johan Kuiper, Paul Quax, Yaël Nossent and Ilze Bot. Annals of Surgery. 2015;262:841-848.

On Thursday 10 January a number of prizes were presented to researchers and students.

The certificate award ceremony of the Honours College took place in the Hooglandse Church in Leiden on Tuesday 21 November. During the ceremony, two students shared their experiences with honours education while Vice-Rector Hester Bijl addressed the students.

Physicists Lucia Bossoni and Martina Huber have been awarded an NWA Ideeëngenerator-grant for research into iron nanoparticles in the brain. These nanoparticles may be linked to air pollution and Alzheimer's disease.

Leiden and Jülich researchers discovered an elegant and simple approach to improve the sensitivity of graphene biosensors. These so-called ‘next generation graphene electronic biochemical sensor devices’ are able to detect very low amounts of HIV DNA thanks to their very low electronic noise.

How do we tackle financial stress among students? Policymakers and students came up with a plan. The outcome has been a report that the university can use to help answer the question. Vera Hilgevoord organised the brainstorm session with students and has compiled their ideas.

A group of patients were given a guided tour of the larger than life Rembrandt canvases on University buildings around the Rapenburg canal. This was with the help of students from Present, a volunteer organisation, who pushed their wheelchairs over the bumpy cobblestones. The canvases are on show until…

Alzheimer’s disease and cancer are two examples of diseases that are related to malfunctioning cellular patterns. The examination of cell tissue, however, takes a lot of time and generates a lot of data. To make the analysis of data easier, Antonios Somarakis of the Data Science Research Programme (DSRP)…

David van Bodegom, Professor of Vitality in an Ageing Population, will give his inaugural lecture on 11 November, also titled Vitality in an Ageing Population. According to Van Bodegom the key to healthy ageing is the lived environment. In the fight against lifestyle-related conditions, he therefore…

Native women are invisible in Mexican society. This is the conclusion Barbara Ortiz draws in her dissertation. PhD defence on 23 February.

He is said to be one of the greatest living statisticians. Bradley Efron gave a lecture in Marekerk and opened LUXs, the Leiden University Center for Statistical Science, the first university statistics centre in the Netherlands.

Various projects at Leiden University have been awarded an Erasmus+ grant, an EU funding tool. This is a substantial boost to the internationalisation of our research and teaching.

A new technique using fluorescent imaging to track the actions of enzymes might aid drug design for new anti-cancer, inflammation and kidney disease treatments. Researchers at the University of York and Leiden University have published these findings in Nature Chemical Biology.

Leiden biologist Suzanne Lommen and an international team of scientists have investigated how a beetle can reduce hay fever in Europe. Locally, the beetle is even able to stop pollen production in a plant that causes allergic reactions. Publication in Nature Communications on April 21.

Professor André Baranski is a champion for improving organ procurement. He believes there should be standardised training and certification for procurement surgeons. This is what he said in his inaugural lecture on 16 April.

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

On Thursday 24 June HE Mr Mayerfas and Cultural Attache Mr Din Wahid visited Leiden University to meet with President Annetje Ottow.

Fewer CO2 emissions, less airborne viral transmission, and a more sustainable form of food production: seven consortia of researchers and societal partners will put a budget of 32 million euros towards developing technological innovations. Important Leiden research on circular electronics by Prof. Dr.…

PhD student Wen Yang discovered how certain cell receptors in E. coli bacteria signal 'smells'. With the use of ice-cold electron microscopy microbiologists from Leiden gain more insight into how bacteria respond to their environment. Publication in mBio.

The worldwide race to the quantum computer is in full swing. This computer can bring about a breakthrough in discovering medicines and new materials. Leiden researchers, together with the TU Delft, are taking part in the race. There is now a dossier online about their work.

How does an embryonic stem cell decide if it becomes a heart cell or a kidney cell? That’s the question computational biologist Maria Mircea studied for her PhD research. She looked at the inside of individual cells to analyse how they change. This is what she discovered.

In June the Final Festival took place, the closing event of the 'Social Science Lab'. New participants of Honours College Science and Society presented their solution for a current social problem.

Psychology teacher of the year is Marc Molendijk. The Master Thesis Awards are for Kim Houwaart and Linda Bomm. Hans van Lennep wins the PhD Publication Prize; Nina Komrij wins the PhD Wild Card: Societal Impact. The Support & Management staff Prize is for the whole Psychology Institute Office and Remond…

The Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) has received a 4m grant for the ECOTIP project. In this project researchers will study how our physical environment affects our health. The aim is to find tipping points: at what point is there a real lack of greenery, healthy food or clean air in a neighb…

Biophysicist Alireza Mashaghi and his collaborators are taking up the fight against muscular dystrophy: genetic disorders that cause muscle weakness. They want to inhibit the clumping of proteins that results in toxic aggregates. For this, the team receives 550,000 euros from Health Holland. The team…

A female body equals a woman. Nonsense, says Professor by Special Appointment to the Socrates Chair Annemie Halsema. She argues that our sense of identity and social environment also determine our identity. ‘We should stop assigning people’s sex at birth.’

From the 11th of May Ewa Snaar-Jagalska has been appointed Professor in the field of cellular tumor biology within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology Leiden. Her research focuses on the cellular tumor biology and human cancer modeling in zebrafish

Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Hadassah Drukarch and Bart Custers from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, explore together with Pranav Khanna, eLaw alumnus, the influence of automation on human–robot interaction and responsibility in surgery innovation.

Islamic banking, freedom of religion, LGBTQ+ acceptance and education are topics that European Muslims find important for their future. These are the results of a survey by Professor of Islam and the West, Maurits Berger. The survey is the starting point of a citizen project in which Berger wants to…

What’s the right dosage of medication for children? Assistant professor Elke Krekels and her colleagues discovered that for some medicines, you can determine this quite simply. On 13 April Krekels received the TOP-Publication award during the annual spring meeting of the Dutch Society for Clinical Pharmacology…

According to a number of British historians, the elderly had a particularly high status in the early Middle Ages. A new book by Leiden cultural historian Thijs Porck sheds a different light on the matter: elderly people had to earn that respect first, and old age was often described in negative terms…

The fastest chemical reaction in the universe takes place inside our eyes.