Leiden Biology student Pam Engelberts received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2016 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.

Plants that are pollinated by fewer species of animal may be less vulnerable to change than was thought. This is what Saskia Klumpers discovered in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She will be awarded a PhD on 15 December.

A study in the Behavioral Biology group of Carel ten Cate at the IBL showed that experience-dependent and -independent preferences influence song learning in zebra finches.

Dutch scale-up In Ovo, a spin-off of Leiden University, has raised 34 million euros to accelerate its international growth and scale-up plans. The new funding is supported by Leiden University’s Libertatis Ergo Holding. The funding has also been provided by, among others, impact investors ECBF and ABN…

If someone around you yawns, the chances are that you too will soon yawn. In orangutans it has now been found that scratching is very contagious. This is what cognitive psychologists from Leiden discovered at Apenheul Primate Park. Publication in American Journal of Primatology.

Exploitation of smaller game is rarely documented before the latest phases of the Pleistocene, which is often taken to imply narrow diets for earlier hominins. In a study now published in Scientific Reports, a team of German and Dutch archaeologists present new data that contradict this view of Lower…

Biologists Michelle Spierings and Ryan Bogaars will both join the Dutch Final of the FameLab Competition on April 21st in Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.

What is the impact of humans on nature? In Science an article appeared in which researchers try to give an answer to that question. Biogeographer and postdoc at LUCL Sietze Norder is one of its authors.

External PhD candidate Liselore Tissen has been appointed ambassador for Leiden City of Science. As the youngest member and the only non-professor in the network, she will be working to raise Leiden's prominence as a city of science.

Vicencio Oostra, who defended his PhD-thesis at the IBL successfully in June 2013, published new insights into the hormonal regulation of butterfly responses to fluctuating environments.

The analysis of protein residues extracted from the storage containers of circa 50,000 year old bone-tools reveals Neandertal strategic selection of bovid ribs to make some of their “lissoirs”.

Professor of Cognitive Psychology Mariska Kret has been awarded the Dr Hendrik Muller Prize by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for her pioneering research into emotions. Kret: ‘This prize offers a wonderful opportunity to give a boost to emotion research.’

IBL-PhD-student Michelle Spierings delivered a great performance at the FameLab national final on the 21st of April. She is now also happy to be back behind her desk.

Leiden Biology student Martienke Baaij received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2017 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.

Op zaterdag 3 juni vindt de Museumnacht Leiden plaats. Ook dit jaar zijn Leidse wetenschappers en studenten onderdeel van de programmering.

What are the typical characteristics of teaching at research universities, and how is excellence defined and promoted? These are the key questions in the latest position paper published by LERU, the partnership of European research universities, including Leiden.

Over 30 ambassadors strengthened their ties with researchers and university leaders in a recent visit to Leiden University. Cross-border collaboration (both literal and figurative) was the theme of presentations and a tour of the Hortus botanicus.

Is polder rice a feasible circular alternative to cows on peat soil? In May, an experimental trial began, with researchers from Leiden University and Wageningen University & Research (WUR) planting around 3,000 rice plants at the Polderlab near Leiden. The researchers aimed to test rice as a middle…

How can young people grow up successfully and contribute to the present and future society? The consortium that is researching this will receive 22 million euros within the scope of the Gravitation programme.

How can the combination of sound composition, astrochemistry, and epistemological analysis provide new and unexpected insights into interstellar chemical reactivity?

To what extent can global issues be solved by multistakeholder collaboration, a relatively new type of organisation? Jan Aart Scholte, the coordinator of the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) interdisciplinary research programme, has received a Dutch Research Council (NWO) grant…

At almost midway through, the “Stoeplanten” (Pavement Plants) citizen science project has been very successful. This research was initiated by Nienke Beets, who while working for the Science Communication and Society research group and Hortus Botanicus, gave her contribution to the Stoeplanten proje…

Sixteen researchers at Leiden University have received a Veni award from the Netherlands Organisation for Academic Research (NWO). This award offers promising young researchers the opportunity to further develop their ideas for a period of three years.

Political scientist Rebekah Tromble (Leiden University) has been appointed as an academic advisor to the Social Science One research commission. She will assist the commission in its new partnership with Facebook, which aims to facilitate in-depth studies of the role of social media in elections and…

Researchers Rowie Stolk and Caelesta Braun’s ‘Litigation in the name of public interest’ Kiem project included an interdisciplinary workshop on the same topic. For starting PhD candidates in particular, this was the chance to build valuable connections.

LERU, the League of European Research Universities, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary on 7 March in Brussels. The network of leading European universities has now grown to include 23 universities.

On Monday 7 September 2015 Leiden Law School welcomed a group of students from Qatar University College of Law. The delegation was invited by the The Hague project

On November 8, the annual Medieval Studies Day will take place, organized by the Flemish Medievalist Association, in cooperation with the Henri Pirenne Institute Ghent. This year’s theme is Pe(s)ts to Parchment: Multidisciplinary Research on Animals in the Middle Ages. On the evening of 7 November,…

Ben Wielstra studies hybrid zones, regions in which distinct populations of organisms meet, mate and produce genetically admixed offspring. In the journal Current Biology, he introduces hybrid zones in an accessible way.

National Week Withouth Meat: March 9th-15th @ Leiden University PURE restaurants

'What do people do with snake venom?' That's the question 11-year-old Joep asked in Dutch TV show Willem Wever. Leiden Professor of Evolutionary developmental zoology and snake venom expert Michael Richardson answers the question in his laboratory.

On 11 May 2017, The Ocean Cleanup revealed a new design for its cleanup system. LAPP was there!

Great news: the MOOC

Ahead of the new Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF), the entire European academic world is calling upon Brussels to double the budget for education, research and innovation.

Leiden Biology student Lukas Kiefer has won the Unilever Research Prize 2018 for his research into efficient production of a new antibiotic. Kiefer: ‘I want to make biological medicines available to people in need.'

They are often little more than a square metre of plants, yet pavement gardens are a source of life. PhD candidate Joeri Morpurgo conducted research in the centre of Amsterdam and The Hague and discovered how important small green spaces are, especially for cities.

Why do some people with adverse childhood experiences develop mental health conditions whereas others do not? A Leiden research project is looking for volunteers aged between 18 and 24 to help us understand more about human resilience.

Researchers from eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies, published a new book on EU data protection law.

Claartje Levelt is professor of First Language Acquisition. She researches how babies and toddlers learn their mother tongue. Besides her work, she enjoys being involved with music.

Dialysis patients experience a range of physical and mental symptoms that interact and influence each otherIn her doctoral research, psychologist Judith Tommel wanted to find the optimum approach to help these dialysis patients improve their quality of life. ‘We need to make sure we avoid excluding…

In the booklet ‘Research with Windows Wide Open’, eight professors in the social sciences and humanities advise colleagues who want to make an impact with their research. They include Leiden professors Andrea Evers and Leo Lucassen. The booklet, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and…

Odile Bodde tells about her stay in London at King's College...

Raymond Fagel, university lecturer in General History, wrote a book about his research on Spanish commander Mondragón. He spared Zierikzee during the Eighty Years’ War and is considered to be ‘the good Spaniard’. What led Fagel to research this topic? And how does such research work? We asked him:

There was a lot of interest. In front of nearly a hundred researchers, supporting colleagues and Martijn Ridderbos, the Vice-Chairman of the Executive Board, Lotte van Dillen, Research Director of Psychology and Saskia Goedhard, Director of Humanities Operations jointly opened the new lab with a classic…

The Casimir Research School and the Graduate School Experimental Plant Sciences will be participating in the first Graduate Programme. This was announced on Wednesday 12 August by Minister Plasterk (Ministry of Education, Culture and Science). Leiden University is a partner in both schools. Nine Dutch…

His instrument, his technique, his music and his life

JUSTREMIT is an ERC-funded project that brings together political theory, ethnography, and security studies in an interdisciplinary study of remittances and global justice.

No less than 33 project received a Leiden Kiem grant in 2023. How did they fare? Olga Bogolyubova shares experiences from her project ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Safety and Danger in the Digital World’.

A consortium including economists, psychologists and public administration scholars from Leiden University will study public acceptance of the hydrogen transition in the Netherlands. They will look at the labour market impact, public perceptions of hydrogen and businesses’ willingness to invest.