We hold the annual Digital Humanities Pilot Project Symposium and Digital Skills Winter Workshop Week in the last week of January. It is open to all LU staff and PhD/MA students.

Over 4,000 visitors came to the seventh edition of the Night of Discoveries, a festival of knowledge and culture, on Saturday 21 September. On this the last summer evening of the year, the festival-goers were treated to over 170 acts on the theme of light and dark, making it a vibrant, busy, educational…

It was the Night of Discoveries on Saturday 16 September: a summer encounter between art and science. Leiden researchers from various disciplines inspired the public with their quest to understand our world.

Leiden or The Hague? Dutch or English? These two questions decide which introduction week new Leiden University students should choose: EL CID, HOP or OWL.

In Germany, the United States and even in Vietnam: all over the world, the Leiden discovery of the birth of two planets was shared. Astronomer Sebastiaan Haffert and his team were able to record multiple planets in the making for the first time and published their findings in Nature Astronomy. A unique…

What does Leiden physicist Wolfgang Löffler think about the award of the Nobel Prize for physics to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland?

'A spectacular new Philippine monitor lizard reveals a hidden biogeographic boundary and a novel flagship species for conservation' . CML-researcher Merlijn van Weerd has participated in a new article in Biology Letters about this discovery.

A European consortium has provided a disruptive technological breakthrough to allow the discovery and characterization of novel enzymes for industrial biotechnology. The technology will open the way to more efficient industrial processes such as in the biofuel, animal feed and paper and pulp industr…

Laura Heitman has been awarded a VIDI grant for her innovative drug research. Heitman strives to optimize a drug’s binding kinetics at its target in order to ultimately fight diseases effectively. She even pleads for a paradigm shift in drug discovery.

Discovering effective new drugs is a long, expensive and uncertain process. Laura Heitman wants to improve this by finding out more about how drugs bind to proteins that play a role in disease. She calls it ‘drug discovery 3.0’. Inaugural lecture on 9 December.

How can rare and expensive materials be used more efficiently to produce cleaner and cheaper fuel? Under the guidance of Marc Koper, Professor of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry, international teams of scientists have published 3 articles in Nature Communications.

Archaeologists from the National Museum of Antiquities (Leiden), the Museo Egizio (Turin, Italy) and Leiden University have found the grave of Panehsy, the 'steward of the temple of (the god) Amun', in Saqqara.

As of April 1, 2018, Erik Danen has been appointed as Professor of Cancer drug target discovery at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). His discipline is cell biology of cancer, in which he focuses on the mechanisms underlying metastasis and therapy resistance.

In the summer of 2010, a special archaeological find resurfaced when plans to redevelop the Paardenmarkt, a parking lot in the historic city center of Alkmaar, began.

For the first time, scientists have traced back a high-energy neutrino to its source in space. It was produced by a so-called blazar—a supermassive black hole. Researchers from neutrino detector IceCube report this in Science. ‘This is a milestone for neutrino science,’ says physicist Dorothea Samtleben…

Promotor: Prof.dr. R. Verpoorte, , Co-Promotor: Young Hae Choi

Biologist Freek Vonk had already appeared in the Time Warp programme, where he was shown milking a snake for its venom, which he needed for his doctoral research. On Friday 18 September, he explained his fascination for snakes to Matthijs van Nieuwkerk in ‘De wereld draait door’, a Dutch news and entertainment…

Promotor: M. Ubbink, Co-promotor: G. Siegal

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…

Welcome to Leiden and The Hague! So there you are, an international BA or MA student, in a city where you don’t know the way and don’t speak the language. What now? Don’t panic: with our international introduction programmes, you’ll soon have learnt all the ins and outs. And another important thing:…

The Honours Class From Solar to Fuel with Bio consisted almost entirely of the workshop on Solar Biofuels from Micro-organisms that drew more than eighty specialist researchers to Leiden's Lorentz Centre in late March/early April. Students Erica Wenker (chemistry) and Jasper van Dobben de Bruijn (law)…

Promotor: M. Ubbink, Co-promotor: G. Siegal

Former dean and physicist Frans Saris writes in his new book ‘Darwin’s combination lock’ how our culture enabled us to dominate nature and about the corresponding responsibilities. Together with Joris Berkhout he will talk about his book during the This Week’s Discoveries on 27 February.

16 April was a special day at the Faculty of Science. In honour of the collaborations with the Chinese partner university, it was declared Xi’an Jiaotong University Day.

Where exactly on the surface of a catalyst do the chemical reactions occur? Until now, it has always been a challenge to identify the exact locations of these ‘active sites’. In a new article in Nature, Leiden chemists helped their international colleagues reveal new insights into this issue. Their…

It was her original Salterio from 1725, built by Michele Barbi, which Franziska Fleischanderl could coincidentally acquire in 2014 that ignited her passion for this special string instrument. Before, she was focussed on contemporary music with modern Hackbrett.

On Friday evening 17 September, Leiden astronomer Joe Callingham can be seen in a new series on Discovery channel. Killers of the Cosmos is about different deadly dangers lurking in the depths of space. Asteroids, cosmic debris, electromagnetic weapons… The show takes a film-noir approach to these threats,…