If there’s one place at the University where it doesn’t matter where you come from, it’s De Kattekop. This, the University nursery, celebrates its 40th birthday in September. Its history reflects developments at the University. Parents are full of praise for it.

After a lobby lasting many years, the Dutch government has decided to finance an independent study of the war of decolonisation (1945-1950) in the former Dutch East Indies. This is partly due to the work of Professor of Colonial and Post-Colonial History, Gert Oostindie, Director of the KITLV. ‘The…

What makes peace missions succeed or fail? Which new technologies will determine the outcome of wars? In recent decades, insufficient use has been made of knowledge of modern warfare, when this is crucial to European security. This is what Frans Osinga, Professor by Special Appointment of War Studies,…

Peter Akkermans, Professor of Archaeology of the Middle East, cannot say for certain how much damage the destruction by IS has caused in Palmyra.

We have been working from home for over 9 weeks. How are the staff members of the Institute for History doing? Andrew Gawthorpe shares his experience below.

Carlo Beenakker has been appointed a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organisation behind the journal Science. Among the Fellows, he is the third Dutch person and first Leiden researcher.

So called 'jihad municipalities' are being more closely monitored as a result of the arrests on 25 November 2019 of two terrorist suspects from Zoetermeer. Jelle van Buuren, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, looks back at the latest developments over the last few y…

Leiden Professor of Molecular astrophysics Ewine van Dishoeck has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). She has been awarded 2.3 million euros in research funding for the MOLDISK programme. Within this programme, Van Dishoeck wants to connect chemistry and physics in…

Doctoral Grant for lecturer to research witness protection at the international courts.

Kinderen hebben wereldwijd een betere toegang gekregen tot de rechter. Hoogleraar Kinderrechten Ton Liefaard schrijft dit in het tijdschrift Sociale Vraagstukken. Hij is voorzichtig positief over de resultaten van een VN-protocol voor rechtsbescherming van kinderen, dat tien jaar bestaat.

Sjaak Neefjes, professor of Chemical Immunology at the LUMC, has been awarded a Spinoza prize of 2.5 million euros. His colleague Ton Schumacher, professor of Immunotechnology affiliated with Leiden University, the LUMC and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek cancer centre, has been awarded the Stevin prize,…

Amsterdam’s attitude to sex work, politeness in historical Arabic letters and malaria in the Middle Ages: again this year, there was a wide variety of topics in the Research Traineeship programme. On Friday 30 August, the trainees finished the last of these projects for now.

De nieuwe leerstoel bij de Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid is onderdeel van de samenwerking tussen de Universiteit Leiden en de rechtbank Den Haag.

A semi-empirical version of the specific reaction parameter approach to density functional theory (SRP-DFT) has been remarkably successful at predicting dissociative chemisorption probability vs. incidence energy curves for reactions on metal surfaces. New quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations on the…

During the week of 15 November, Little Amal, the larger-than-life doll visited The Hague. Naturally she received a warm welcome by Leiden University during her visit. Little Amal (art project The Walk) was invited by Amare.

Leiden University is currently working on the new Gorlaeus Building, a sustainable modern building for the Faculty of Science. To make room for the phase 2A construction work, a plane tree of over 20 metres in height was moved on 17 December. The tree has been conserved. Its new home will be on the…

Prof. dr. Pancras Hogendoorn is stepping down as dean of the Faculty of Medicine and vice-chair of the Executive Board of Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC). He is also resigning from all associated secondary posts. Hogendoorn has taken his decision in anticipation of the findings of an inquiry…

The 'Groot Nederlands Student Kampioenschap' student games have been held for the first time in two cities, Delft and The Hague. To make this happen our Campus The Hague worked together with The Hague University of Applied Sciences and Inholland University of Applied Sciences. Three students look back…

A new Senate (Eerste Kamer) has been elected in the Netherlands and the current government coalition has lost its majority. The majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) have not been this far apart for quite some time. High time to merge both chambers, argues Wim…

A consortium led by Eefje Cuppen, Professor Governance of Sustainability at the Institute of Public Administration, has been granted NWO funding for a research project looking into the social, societal, and technical aspects of the energy transition.

In the renovation of the P.J. Veth Building, much attention has been devoted to the environment and the sustainable (re)use of materials. You can now separate waste easier, fill your own water bottle at the Join the Pipe tap point and pick up a free book at the giveaway library. All this is possible…

Wessel Kraaij has been appointed Professor of Applied Data Analytics with effect from 1 March 2016. Kraaij will use new methods to analyse big data sets. He intends to use data from various data-intensive research fields to test these methods in practice.

Professor P.F. (Paul) Wouters has been appointed dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences with effect from 1 January 2019. Wouters has been appointed for a period of three years and succeeds Professor Hanna Swaab, whose second term of office as dean expires this year. Swaab will remain…

TEXTS FROM ANCIENT EGYPT. Highlights from the Collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute. Online exhibition on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the foundation ‘Het Leids Papyrologisch Instituut’ in 2015.

Leiden University College The Hague turns 7 today (29 September 2017). Lieke Schreel, educational director of LUC has been with the college from the start. She shares her thoughts on another year and birthday of the College.

When you want to analyse big quantities of archaeological data, you run into the issue that searching through excavation reports is extremely time-consuming. If only there existed a search engine specifically focused on querying these reports… But wait, work on an archaeological search engine focused…

Jelle Wouters (RTC Bhutan), Erik de Maaker (CADS Leiden) and Radhika Gupta (CADS Leiden) have been awarded a €260.000 grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation for the research project ‘Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan’. This 4-year research project focuses on vernacular and unacknowledged heritages…

Building the neutrino detector KM3NeT on the Mediterranean Sea floor has picked up pace. Five detection lines, each carrying eighteen detectors, have been sunk and installed, and the first measurement data are coming in, says neutrino physicist Dorothea Samtleben.

Gert Renkema vertelt ons meer over het proces en de gang van zaken rondom de financiën van FGGA.

For her internship at the Textile Museum, master's student Evi van Stiphout researched the Surinamese cloths of the Leiden Cotton Company. Leiden and Suriname have a closer relationship than many people think. ‘Not much is written about Suriname’.

The Bolivian people will make their opinion known on a change to the constitution in a referendum on 21 February. Leiden University organised a symposium on the referendum on 11 February. The aim of the change is to allow President Evo Morales to remain in power until 2025.

The roof of the lecture halls at the Faculty of Science was fitted with solar panels in June, making it the biggest solar-panel-covered roof in Leiden.

‘Seated behind her desk, she initiated and influenced embassies, conventions, ambassadorial meetings, sieges, and skirmishes that had kept a war-torn early modern Europe in its grip.’ This is how Nadine Akkerman, researcher as the Leiden Institute for Cultural Disciplines and author of The Correspondence…

TRI Leiden has been strongly involved, together with Nottingham Law School, in the development of the EU Cross-Border Insolvency Court-to-Court Cooperation Principles (‘EU JudgeCo Principles’). They were finalised in February 2015 and recently a book has been published. During a business rescue conference…

Professor Peter Bisschop has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. He will invest the 2.5 million euros in his research into puranas: ancient texts, commonly written in Sanskrit, that are up to fifteen hundred years old.

On the initiative of Leiden Law School’s Art Committee, the festive opening of the photo exhibition of the Leiden Amateur Photographic Society (LAFV) took place on Friday 20 May 2022 in the C corridor of the Kamerlingh Onnes Building.

Castles, monasteries and bridges, but also city profiles, history prints and water management works. Leiden University Libraries (UBL) manages one of the most important collections of topographical images in the Netherlands. The collection, bequested to UBL by Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis (1797-1872)…

Cut marks on the bones of bears show that people in North-West Europe used bearskins to keep warm 300,000 years ago.

The European Commission adopted a proposal regarding common rules promoting the right to repair for consumers.

Prehistoric people may well have had an emotional bond with domesticated dogs much earlier than we thought. Leiden PhD candidate and vet Luc Janssens discovered that a dog found at the start of the last century in a grave dating back 14,000 years had been sick for a long time and had been cared for.…

Inspectors at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can require people to provide more information relating to their tax returns. Esther Huiskers-Stoop from the Tax Law department investigated the rules in place to protect us when we are required to provide information to the tax authorities.

Researchers have spent years looking for the ‘missing link’ between wolves and dogs. But many of the domesticated dogs that had been found prove to have been wolves after all. This is what vet and archaeologist Luc Janssens says in his dissertation. PhD defence on 27 June.

The energy transition is already a huge challenge for society, but sustainable use of resources is even more complicated. Yet it is at least as urgent. Ester van der Voet has been working on it for decades, for example within the United Nations. Since February, she is a professor at the Centre for Environmental…

The current COVID-19 vaccination campaign involves injecting the vaccine into muscle tissue, but injecting a smaller amount of vaccine in the skin might also provide good protection. The #wakeuptocorona crowdfunding campaign has enabled Anna Roukens (LUMC) to examine the safety and efficacy of vaccination…

SAILS Professor Gerard van Westen tells us about his first 100 days 'in the office'.

Universiteit Leiden en Unicef werken al 10 jaar samen om kennis over kinderrechten uit te breiden en te verspreiden. Ze verlengen deze samenwerking.

What do you do if you have a book from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but you suspect that the binding contains a fragment of a medieval manuscript? University lecturer Thijs Porck has received an NWO grant to experiment with a camera attached to a tube. 'The project boils down to keyhole surgeries…

If you have a plan that could improve the education or the learning environment of the Faculty of Humanities in terms of diversity or inclusion, you can apply for a grant from the faculty’s JEDI Fund. This year, Nasreen has been helping to develop a new syllabus for the first-year Ancient History co…