How do you behave towards patients with life-threatening conditions who do not want to know all the details of the state of their health? This question brought psychologist Liesbeth van Vliet and anthropologist Annemarie Samuels together. It’s an unusual partnership, but their interdisciplinary approach…

ICT, Organisation

Rather than one key and one strong lock, biology often uses tens or hundreds of weaker links to bind parts together, such as cells membranes. This allows for selectivity and also reversibility: the binding can also be undone. Researchers first caught this phenomenon using spheres or colloids, and published…

How can society let go of its obsession with economic growth and focus on goals as wellbeing, inclusion and sustainability? This is one of the core questions which a new 3 million euro European project will tackle the upcoming four years. Leiden University researcher Rutger Hoekstra is project coordinator…

Costanza Franceschini discusses the Sea-ing Africa project, offering unique anthropological research opportunities in Ghana and Morocco for Masters students.

Associate Professor Lettie Dorst has received a Vidi grant to research how machine translation programmes such as Google Translate and ChatGPT translate words and expressions used metaphorically. This still regularly goes wrong, resulting in far too literal, incorrect and sometimes incomprehensible…

The new student members of the Programme Committee (OLC) are Pablo Pandocchi, Benjamin Maldonado, Emily Berube-Palsboll and Nico Lesenfants Ramos.

The cultural linguistic minority group of deaf people who communicate using sign language systematically experiences limited access to fundamental rights. Linguist Joni Oyserman identified this problem and has received a Meijers grant to fund her investigation.

To better prepare students for lab sessions, a team from the BSc-programme Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences (BFW) creates interactive videos. These videos use humour and examples to show students basic skills and commonly used procedures. 'We want to make education more efficient and fun.'

Victoria Nyst's love for sign language was sparked when she accidentally ended up at a deaf school while studying African linguistics. The university lecturer has since been awarded a Vici grant to research the history of these languages.

An international team of astronomers led by Dutch scientist Martijn Oei has discovered the largest pair of jets from a black hole ever seen. The 'jumbojets' extend a combined length of 140 Milky Ways. The Leiden Observatory played a prominent role in this research. The publication will feature on the…

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a workshop within the project 'Human Development and Its Outliers' on 26 and 27 March 2026 at Leiden University.

In the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) housed its enslaved people on ‘Slave Island’ in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Today ‘Slave Island’ is under serious threat from property developers. Senior lecturer Alicia Schrikker, together with her Sri Lankan colleagues Iromi Perera…

The university's CO2 footprint - a visual representation of Leiden University's environmental impact - is calculated every year. The CO2 footprint for 2020 shows a striking break in the trend in terms of energy use, mobility and waste.

In January 2021, eLaw joined the Computers Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) Conference that is about privacy and data protection. The group on Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University put together a panel that combined perspectives on Art, Society, & Technology.

An impressive 12 researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an 800,000-euro grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This will enable them to develop their own line of research over the next five years.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has published an interim data release from Gaia, the space telescope mapping out the Milky Way in 3D. The first scientific papers published today reveal half a million stars in the Omega Centauri globular cluster, nearly 400 candidate gravitational lensers and the positions…

Physicists in Leiden have built a microscope that can measure no fewer than four key properties of a material in a single scan, all with nanoscale precision. The instrument can even examine complete quantum chips, accelerating research and innovation in the field of quantum materials.

For decades, the trade in pocketbooks prescribing how to be a good Muslim flourished in East Africa, but in recent years the number of books in circulation has been declining. University lecturer Annachiara Raia is the recipient of an Impact Explorer grant to revive this tradition, in cooperation with…

Jasper Knoester is the dean of the Faculty of Science. How is he doing, what exactly does he do and what does his day look like? In each newsletter, Jasper gives an insight into his life.

You win the Leiden Teaching Prize and suddenly all eyes are on you. Three past recipients reflect on how this student-awarded prize has changed how they work and improved their teaching – and how they chose to spend the money.

A staff exchange to Oxford gave academic editor Helena Lysaght new insights and inspiration for communicating about research. Read what a staff exchange could mean for you!

Lecture, NGL-lezing

Lecture, Workshop and Egeria Lecture

Lecture, Tuesday Talks: Science Insights

Online webinar

Arts and leisure, Arts and leisure

VVIK Lecture

PhD defence

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

PhD defence, Performance

Festival, Graduation Film Festival

Festival, Graduation Ceremony

From academic freedom to security and medical breakthroughs: during Leiden University’s 451st Dies Natalis, the speakers reflected on the role of universities in a world of social and geopolitical tensions.

Orange the World 2025

Lecture, Hybrid workshop

Lecture, Pint of Science

Lecture

Lecture

Lecture

Exhibition

Didactics, Research, ICT

Lecture, China Seminar

Lecture

Festival

Debate

My colleagues and I have been devastated to learn that our good colleague and friend Stefan Landsberger (born 1955) passed away unexpectedly, on 26 September 2024. Stefan had been a fixture of China Studies in the Netherlands, where he had been Associate Professor of contemporary Chinese History and…