The placebo effect was completely new to her when Lingling Weng began the PhD project in Leiden. She is now a postdoc in China. 'It would be great to investigate the underlying mechanisms of placebo and nocebo effects with my current knowledge of EEG and fMRI.' PhD defence on 17 October.

Bacteria whirl around in the mouths of most people, forming dental plaques and sometimes causing nasty gum infections. Treponema denticola might be a dangerous pathogen, but not much is known about this bacterium. It was up to Ariane Briegel and her research group to change that.

The Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Danstem Institute from the University of Copenhagen and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne have received 300m euros from the Novo Nordisk foundation. The aim of this new international consortium is to bring stem-cell based therapies…

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…

Biological chemist Nathaniel Martin and his team received an NWO grant to examine how blocking a specific enzyme in our body, NNMT, could be helpful in the treatment of some cancers. Trials with mice have been promising, and together with the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Martin wants to take the next…

Have you ever experienced the feeling of awkwardness when attending a party where you didn’t know anybody? Ever felt shy at a party within the first few minutes? While this feeling is labelled loosely as feeling socially anxious, social anxiety disorder goes to a much further extent.

Mathematics can help predict thrombosis. Mathematician Mark Alber has developed models that even aid in suggesting treatments. In the Kloosterman lecture on 27 June, he will explain how this works.

Four Leiden researchers have been awarded Proof of Concept grants by the ERC. These grants, each worth 150,000 euros, help researchers translate the findings of previous ERC projects into innovative practical applications.

When a bacterium becomes more resistant to one antibiotic, it sometimes becomes more sensitive to another. To better understand this interaction, researchers from the Leiden Institute of Biology (IBL) and the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR) under supervision of Daniel Rozen and Coen…

PhD defence

Skåne University Hospital, Lund University and Leiden University Medical Center will work together to expand their research, teaching and development relating to Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products. That is the essence of a Memorandum of Understanding signed at SciLifeLab near Stockholm on Wednesday…

Antibiotic resistance is a common problem among patients. The European Project TIPAT trains pharmacologists, microbiologists and immunologists of six universities in interdisciplinary thinking. The ultimate goal is to develop better treatment guidelines to combat resistance. Coen van Hasselt of the…

Delft, Nov. 15th, 2022 – Today, eight professors were simultaneously inaugurated as ‘Medical Delta professors’ at Leiden University, LUMC, TU Delft, Erasmus University and/or Erasmus MC. With an appointment of two or more of these five academic institutions, they combine technology and healthcare in…

Digital diagnostic tools should improve the diagnostic process of patients with musculoskeletal complaints, so that they can receive the right treatment more quickly.

How can we improve the treatment of thrombosis, reduce the disease’s impact and spend less money while we’re at it? This is what Erik Klok, Professor of Internal Medicine and an internist, is researching. He will discuss it in depth in his inaugural lecture on 10 March.

Traditional school tests, like the Dutch CITO, largely reflect students' existing knowledge and abilities. However, dynamic testing sheds light on students' learning potential, discovered Mirjam de Vreeze in her PhD research. This approach is especially promising for children with learning challenges,…

On Monday 26 February the terrible news reached us that our gifted former Egyptology student – and former student assistant at the Leids Papyrologisch Instituut – Juan Archidona Ramírez had succumbed to cancer.

Sebastian Pomplun manages to reach proteins with drugs even where this was thought impossible. That is why he and his research group have been allowed to join Oncode Institute. With nine others, he had been selected from 72 applicants to contribute to Oncode Institute's mission: to accelerate breakthroughs…

Marta Fiocco has been appointed as of 1 April as professor of applied mathematics, in particular medical statistics. Fiocco's appointment is at the Faculty of Science and at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC). She conducts research into 'personalised medicine', tailor-made medicines for cancer…

Care conferences for long-term residents (15+ years) in forensic mental health care are widely appreciated by all parties involved. Research by Leiden University shows that the demand for these meetings is so great that the supply cannot be met within the desired time frame.

Are you an international researcher working for Leiden University? Please note that you probably are legally obliged to take out health insurance. Here you will find if you need a public or a private health insurance, and how to apply for it.

Have you experienced or witnessed unacceptable or transgressive behaviour? This page gives information about what you can do yourself and which ‘helplines’ can assist you in this situation.

Are you a PhD candidate, and is there something you’d prefer to discuss with someone other than your thesis director or supervisor? The confidential counsellor for PhD candidates is here to help. You can speak to him/her in confidence and receive advice. If you experience symptoms of physical or mental…

PhD candidate Mengxu Zhang (Division of Systems Pharmacology and Pharmacy) published a comprehensive and important review on “The potential impact of CYP and UGT drug-metabolizing enzymes on brain target site drug exposure” in Drug Metabolism Reviews.

Research

PhD candidates Mohammed Saleh and Berfin Gülave (Division of Systems Pharmacology and Pharmacy) published their research paper on “Using the LeiCNS-PK3.0 Physiologically-Based Pharmacokinetic Model to Predict Brain Extracellular Fluid Pharmacokinetics in Mice”.

PhD candidate Divakar Budda (Division of Systems Pharmacology and Pharmacy) and Solen Gousset (UCLouvain) shared were the shared winners of the best poster award of the 5th QSPainRelief General Assembly meeting held early December in Leiden.

A deliberate attack on a tangible element of a culture, such as a temple, is often also an attack on intangible elements: the religion or religious customs. Equally, the intangible can be attacked without the involvement of the tangible, for example the brutal curtailment of rights. How are these reflected…

People who move most in the afternoon and evening are less insulin resistant than people who move mainly in the morning or spread throughout the day. This makes them at lower risk of type 2 diabetes. These are the results that researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) have published…

The number of women in the Netherlands dying before, during or after childbirth has halved.

PhD defence

Juan Masullo (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) receives a grant from the Elise Mathilde Fund/Leiden University Fund to conduct his research project ‘Forging an Anti-Mafia Culture: Observational and Experimental Evidence from Italy’. Masullo aims to find out what ordinary Italians think…

Netherlands and China can learn from each other to handle household and livestock wastewater more sensibly. In the FOREWARD project, scientists from Leiden, Wageningen, and China are working together with local partners on feasible solutions that advance the environment, health, and economy.

'It gave our team a big boost to hear that our work was valuable,' says medical chemist Elmer Maurits about the moment they won the Venture Challenge. With their company Iprotics, they want to develop a drug that can better treat patients with autoimmune diseases and blood cancers. 25,000 euros of prize…

eLaw - Center of Law and Digital technologies from Leiden Law School, and the Vascular Surgery Department at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, join forces to explore the use of AI for diabetes and secondary prevention of diabetic foot problems and won a prize for it.

Several consortia in which Leiden University is involved have been awarded Dutch Research Agenda funding. Leiden is the coordinator of five of these consortia. These five consortia will receive grants worth a total of almost 24 million euros. They relate to interdisciplinary projects that will bring…

Hundreds of thousands of Dutch people suffer from pain caused by knee osteoarthritis and the number is rising fast. Prof. Jaap Harlaar specialises in clinical biomechanics. His research is helping improve osteoarthritis treatment. Harlaar has been appointed Medical Delta Professor and now holds posts…

While health data is essential for scientific research, that data also needs to be protected. In her doctoral thesis, Irith Kist found a balance between protecting the individual and exchanging health data.

Autism, Alzheimer’s, and bipolar disorder: can the development of these mental health conditions be influenced by the ketogenic diet? Increasingly, research suggests it might. 'For those it helps, it can be life-changing,' says neuroscientist Eline Dekeyster.

The fact that corona has created a wave of creativity is evident when walking around in the lab of pharmacologist Coen van Hasselt from the LACDR. Suddenly there were far fewer master's students permitted in the lab for their research. So Van Hasselt came up with smart solutions to enable lab work to…

PhD student Janine Westendorp and her colleagues conducted literature research on what patients with cancer and their loved ones perceive as harmful communication from healthcare providers. The results were published in the journal Psycho-Oncology and are released as a poster to distribute to healthcare…

To eat or get eaten. It describes the evolutionary race of snakes versus the mammals and birds that prey on these snakes. Muzaffar Ali Khan devoted his PhD to investigating the molecular mechanisms play of the evolutionary arms race, and has his promotion 16 February. What makes mammals and birds successful…

Care robots, medical treatments, deepfakes and self-driving cars all with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI). The BrAInpower exhibition at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave shows spectacular applications of AI and explains how it can make such huge leaps. Bas Haring, Professor of Public Understanding of Science,…

This summer, one of our BPS-master students, Ramazan Kiliç, will travel to Baltimore to present his research at the annual ARRE Research Symposium, a conference on ASXL-disorders that attracts researchers from all over the world, including the US, Japan, Germany, Ireland and, of course, The Netherlands.…

Organisation

In the aftermath of the childcare benefits affair in the Netherlands, the treatment of citizens by public authorities is more often a subject of discussion. This also applies to the period within which citizens can lodge an objection to a government decision.

On 7 February 2021, Christa Tobler appeared on the BBC Wales radio programme 'Sunday Supplement' (a political and current affairs programme), entitled 'Covid, homelessness and votes for women'. The 50th anniversary of Swiss women's suffrage at the federal level, is commemorated on 7 February 2021.

Oncode Investigator Mario van der Stelt and his colleagues have discovered a new potential drug that suppresses chemotherapy induced neuropathic pain.

Francien Dechesne, Associate Professor at eLaw, contributed as an expert to the advisory report of the organisation AlgorithmAudit, which was presented to the Dutch Minister for Digitalisation Alexandra van Huffelen on Wednesday 29 November 2023. The report contains a number of concrete norms to avoid…

How feasible is the new migration deal and is it really the breakthrough politicians like Mark Rutte claim it to be? Dutch television programme Nieuwsuur asked various experts, including Mark Klaassen, for an answer to that question.