How can we develop new chemical biology tools and approaches to understand and interfere with glucosylceramide metabolism in relation to Gaucher disease?

Promotor: H.S. Overkleeft, Co-Promotor: B.I. Florea

We will study how inoculation of former arable land with soil (including the microbiome, soil fauna and seeds/rhizomes of ground flora) from old forests along with planting targeted tree species mixtures will improve productivity and more rapidly restore forest-adapted communities and ulttimately result…

For a successful implementation of an educational reform, teachers need to regard the proposal as being practical. I used a modular, success-oriented approach to make a context-based reform practical for implemtentation in Duthc biology education. educational reform, modular, teachers, biology, success-oriented,…

Roel Wouters (24), a biology student at Leiden University, is a finalist in the election for UN youth delegate for Biodiversity and Food. The digital polls open for a week on Friday 22 October. Under-30s can vote for Roel at www.stemroel.nl.

Paul Brakefield, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the Institute of Biology in Leiden (IBL) has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his research. He will receive 2.5 million euro to develop his research programme over a period of five years.

Biology is one of the four top educational programs at Leiden University according to the national “Guide to Universities” (Keuzegids Universiteiten).

‘It was not always accepted, but I just wanted to be a researcher. Now, I am as happy as can be.’ It is one of the quotes from the International Women’s Day presentation for Biology students. Seven women, working as researchers and teachers at the CML, IBL, and Naturalis, shared their experiences with…

A Vici grant and a Science-GROOT: scientists from the Institute of Biology Leiden have been awarded prestigious grants from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). From investigating bacteria without cell walls to harnessing plants with the help of microorganisms.

Gijs van der Velden has one of the best study results in his first college year of all science studies. With that, he won the Young Talent Incentive award and received 500 euros of the Koninklijke Hollandse Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW). The biology student remains quite nonchalantly. ‘Of course,…

On Monday the 8th of December, the annual symposium of the IBL will be organized at the main building of the LUMC Leiden. This year’s theme is “Integrative Biology towards Healthy Communities”.

An external visitation committee gave the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) an outstanding assessment. In terms of research quality and relevance to society, the IBL gets the highest score: excellent. The increase with five new female professors also receives praise from the committee.

Despite being the object of intense study, embryonic development has been difficult to model due to a number of reasons. First, complex tissues can be comprised of many cell types, of which we probably only know a subset.

Ariane Briegel has been appointed Professor in the fìeld of Ultrastructural Biology within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology from the 1st of December 2015. Her expertise is in using electron cryotomography to study how microbes sense and respond to their environment.

Vera van Noort has been appointed Professor in the field of Computational Biology within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology from the 1st of February 2017. Van Noort’s expertise is in bioinformatics and her research focuses on the computational analysis of large-scale biological data…

On February 24, 2017, the Institute of Biology Leiden organised the first edition of the Biology Career Event. The career event for third year bachelor and master students was well received by the attendants. ‘I felt that the presenters and people doing the workshops were really trying to help us get…

As of 1 July, Professor of Mathematical Biology Roeland Merks has got a full appointment at Leiden University. Before this expansion, he worked one day a week at the Mathematical Institute (MI). Merks will work half of his full appointment at the MI and the other half at the Institute of Biology Leiden…

150 new Biology students have arrived in Leiden. This is more than ever and we seem to settle among the big three Universities for Biology in the Netherlands.

The European Union has invested ten million euros in the so-called iNEXT-Discovery consortium. The goal of this new consortium is to enable European researchers to extend innovative structural biology research. The Netherlands Centre for Electron Nanoscopy (NeCEN) is also part of iNEXT-Disovery, which…

The studies reported in this thesis were situated in the context of an innovation of Dutch secondary school biology curricula. As in any innovation, the practical knowledge of teachers determine the outcomes through the decisions they make while planning and teaching their lessons. The aim of the studies…

Biology student Britt van Kasterop has received a Holland Society Young Talent Award for her excellent results in the first year of study. The online awards ceremony took place on 30 November.

Thomas Bakkum en Tom van der Wel, two PhD candidates from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, have both won poster prizes at the EMBL Chemical Biology Conference 2018 in Heidelberg.

Recently graduated Biology student Julia López Delgado is one of the winners of the Holland Society Young Talent Awards 2019. She received her prize during the festive award ceremony on 25 November in Haarlem.

Gilles van Wezel has been appointed the new Scientific Director of the Institute of Biology Leiden starting September 1st, 2018. Van Wezel succeeds Herman Spaink, who has been the Scientific Director since September 2014.

The new academic year has started and with it education as well. Associate professor Dennis Claessen and Director of Education Han de Winde from the Institute of Biology Leiden devised an environmentally friendly introduction to the Leiden Bio Science Park for their students, with the help of Plastic…

The students of iGEM Leiden 2021 have scored well in the eponymous biology competition: they won a Gold Medal and the Best Safety & Security Award. The student team received the awards for their project DOPL LOCK, in which the team tries to make genetic modification safer.

On Thursday the 24th of November, Tseard Hoekstra and Jeroen Ververs (members of the delegation Holland Rijnland), Geert de Snoo (Dean Faculty of Science), Martina Vijver (CML), Herman Spaink (Scientific Director IBL) and Klaas Vrieling (IBL) explored possibilities for collaborations between companies…

Nature uses a special class of histone proteins, histone variants, to modulate the properties of chromatin at defined genomic locations.

The Leiden iGEM team has won the grand prize at the iGEM international biology competition. The students won a further five prizes, including those for best diagnostics tracks and best inclusion. ‘We still can’t believe it. It feels almost surreal,’ team member Amber Schonk said yesterday to University…

It is the dream of Professor Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes to grow fertile egg cells in the lab. But she says there is a long way to go in her discipline until that is possible. This is the message of her inaugural lecture on 29 June 2020, the first digital inaugural lecture at Leiden University.

During the spring of 2021, a group of eight biology students from Leiden set out into the dunes in search of amphibians. Using DNA, they determined the geographic origin of the animals. And guess what? In many cases they discovered exotic populations of animals that do not naturally belong in The Netherlands.…

Gayathri Jaikamur has been awarded by the Dopper Foundation in the Change Make Challenge. She is a student of Masters Biology (Specialisation: Evolution, Conservation and Biodiversity) from India - working under the supervision of CML-researcher Dr. Thijs Bosker (and co-supervision of Dr. Nadja Brun).…

The deeper understanding of an organism's pathology is important for developing treatments. Over centuries of systematic research, clinical researchers have demonstrated that the more information they acquire about the cellular properties and their organisation in the tissue, the better they can understand…

We perform multidisciplinary research at molecular, cellular, and organismal levels of animal biology to increase fundamental understanding of health and disease.

Martijn Verkuilen is the winner of the Unilever Research Prize 2022. By transferring DNA from a plant into yeast, he made the first move to produce a new drug for type 2 diabetes. He collected his prize in Wageningen on 24 November.

Students of the Biology minor course Molecular Design have successfully boosted their skills in collaboration, research and writing with the recently developed E-learning Skills Platform. The biology students and their teachers greatly value the initiative. ‘Sometimes I couldn’t believe what progress…

From the 11th of May Ewa Snaar-Jagalska has been appointed Professor in the field of cellular tumor biology within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology Leiden. Her research focuses on the cellular tumor biology and human cancer modeling in zebrafish