Promotor: M.L. van Hecke

The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic (LAPP) is a pro bono initiative concerning legal questions on plastics and is founded to address and research the legal issues related to plastic pollution.

Promotor: P.M. Brakefield

In light of climate change, it is crucial to determine whether plant species can adapt to future climates to avoid extinction. Plants adapt to various conditions by altering their functional traits, such as leaf size or photosynthetic rate. Some traits appear linked and vary together between species,…

Plastics have become an integral part of modern society due to their versatility and durability.

Help us spot and clean up the plastic in the canals of Leiden! Leiden University is calling on the good folk of Leiden to help our researchers study the plastic in the city’s canals. And if you’d like our canals to be plastic-free, why not donate towards a fleet of canoes to clean them up?

The Plastic Soup Foundation and Parley for the Oceans hosted the very first Plastic Heath Summit in Amsterdam on 3 October, covering the most relevant and pressing health concerns surrounding plastics and human health. Beyond discussing the latest findings in the field we asked the urgent question:…

Plastic pollution is a major environmental issue. Although regulation is being adopted, plastic pollution is still increasing. Effective and strict enforcement is key and NGOs and civilians can be instrumental in this.

For many system in statistical physics the microcanonical and canonical ensemble are equivalent in the thermodynamic limit, but not for all.

Promotores: Prof.dr. P.M. Brakefield, Prof.dr. B.J. Zwaan (Wageningen Universiteit)

Merijn Tinga, the Plastic Soup Surfer, launched the Pick Up 10 campaign. This campaign, supported by Google and National Geographic, uses photo recognition to identify and monitor litter through an app.

With this thesis the PhD-candidate aims to enrich the body of evidence concerning the relation between stress and health, and the mediating role of (un)conscious perseverative cognitions, which is captured in the extended perseverative cognition hypothesis.

After years of lobbying by environmental activists, a deposit scheme for small plastic bottles is to be introduced on 1 July 2021. One of the leaders in the fight is alumnus Merijn Tinga. The university will have collection points for plastic bottles and is also supporting the Plastic Spotter citizen…

FFashion, particularly fast fashion, is a major contributor to plastic pollution in the form of microplastic fibres. The 80-year-old Martindale test for interior textiles could be part of the solution.

Two weeks after 3 October the Leiden canals were still full of plastic disposable cups. Auke-Florian Hiemstra and fellow students have fished thousands of these cups out of the canals and photographed them. Now they put a photo of one of these canal cups on Instagram every day.

Current clients

Enhancing social inclusion through developing methods and analytical tools for understanding and reasoning about such phenomena based on sensor data.

Plastic pollution is a major global problem. In Geneva, world leaders are discussing a possible plastics treaty. Lecturer Esther Kentin talked to Dutch news platform NU.nl about the UN summit: ‘A treaty is only a small part of the solution.’

Nanoplastics influence the behaviour of larval zebrafish, says new research by the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) and the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML). The researchers observed that a certain type of nanoparticles leads to stress reactions in the sugar balance, resulting in hyperactivity…

This is the team of LAPP:

Piecing together the urnfield mortuary process in the Lower-Rhine-Basin, ca. 1300 - 400 BC

A group of biology students are working on a solution to the world’s plastics problem by getting bacteria to make biodegradable plastic.

From researching plastic pollution to caring for injured wildlife, volunteers play a crucial role in conservation. But much of the valuable knowledge they gather remains unused.

Plastic pollution is a major global problem. In Geneva, world leaders are discussing a possible plastics treaty. Lecturer Esther Kentin talked to Dutch news platform NU.nl about the UN summit: ‘A treaty is only a small part of the solution.’

Engineering an efficient microbial enzymatic polyethylene degradation pathway via an innovative combination of biochemistry and computational biology tools for enzyme discovery and characterization.

This thesis explores Breaking of Ensemble Equivalence (BEE) in random graph models by examining the spectral properties of adjacency matrices. The goal is to identify spectral characteristics that differentiate random graph ensembles, enhancing the understanding of complex network structures and beh…

In this thesis, we have used numerical approaches to study the effects of translational symmetry breaking on strange metallic systems as realised by the holographic duality⁠.

From 27 to 31 January, a workshop on the regulation of plastic pollution based on scientific evidence will be held at the Lorentz Center in Leiden.

On Friday 8 February, the first Plastic Avengers Conference took place in Amsterdam. Initiator Merijn Tinga, the Plastic Soup Surfer from Leiden, brought together ‘independent plastic fighters' to arrive at a manifesto against plastic pollution. The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic was also invited…

At the recent UN summit in Geneva, representatives from more than 180 countries failed to reach a global plastics agreement. Esther Kentin, a lecturer at Leiden Law School, spoke to media outlets on the issue: ‘Human health is at stake.’

On 3 May2017 LAPP participated in a meeting on microplastics at the Plastic Soup Foundation.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics states that a measurement collapses a wavefunction onto an eigenstate of the corresponding measurement operator.

The Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference was founded in 2013 to publish a selection of the best papers presented at the biennial LUCAS Graduate Conference, an international and interdisciplinary humanities conference organized by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). The…

After studying medicine in Leiden, Diederik Hofstede specialised in plastic surgery. 'I was attracted by its creativity and I enjoy working with my hands.' Cosmetic surgery is just 5% of the work.'

14 March 2018 a Citizens’ Dialogue about plastic-use in Europe with First-Vice President Frans Timmermans took place in Utrecht. It was one in a series of dialogues organized by the European Commission held throughout Europe. LAPP-student Emily den Boer joined the evening.

On 27 November 2019, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) organized a symposium on the plastic pollution crisis.

LAPP students Emily den Boer and Louise Floris, together with Esther Kentin, wrote about the proposal for a plastic bottle deposit return system that has been discussed in the Dutch Parliament in April 2019.

Jo-Anne Verschoor wins the Unilever Research Prize 2020. The master's student in Biology developed a method to test whether bacteria are capable of degrading plastic. Verschoor: 'Using specific enzymes from these bacteria, we may be able to efficiently recycle plastic in the future.

Every Sunday you can help fish plastic and other floating garbage out of the Leiden canals. You can use your own canoe or loan one from Plastic Spotter and join the garbage-fishing fleet. Annetje Ottow, President of Leiden University, was one of the crew on Sunday 4 July.

Leiden University will install over 30 tap water stations in the autumn of 2017 at the various University buildings. The first is already in use.

Shell, our country's largest company, is constructing a vast plastics plant in the United States. And it is doing so at a time when the European Union, led by the Netherlands, is launching a major pact to combat use of plastic.

A study of the technology, form, function, and use of pottery from the settlements Uitgeest-Groot Dorregeest and Schagen-Muggenburg 1, Roman Period, North-Holland, the Netherlands

This research focuses on the distribution of chemical elements in protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planets. These disks form around young stars and contain gas and dust, from which planets grow. Ice plays a crucial role in planet formation, aiding the clumping of dust particles and influencing…

Laboratory, observation and modeling work on the dissociation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in interstellar environments and the formation of new molecular species through the fragmentation process.

Parents may pass anxiety onto their offspring by exposing them to anxious behaviors in novel situations. Just as the parents’ anxious signals lead to anxiety, parents’ confident signals can ward off anxiety in the offspring. This project is seeking a new way to break anxiety transmission in the family…

At the recent UN summit in Geneva, representatives from more than 180 countries failed to reach a global plastics agreement. Esther Kentin, a lecturer at Leiden Law School, spoke to media outlets on the issue: ‘Human health is at stake.’