The Forensic Family and Youth Care Studies research group conducts innovative high-quality research aiming to gain knowledge about deviant developmental trajectories of vulnerable children, adolescents, and families, about how to prevent problematic development and how to intervene when necessary.

Is blended care a feasible and effective treatment method for social anxiety in adolescence?

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

The programme group Parenting, Child Care and Development carries out general courses within the field of Education and Child Studies and specialised courses within the field of Child and Family Science.

The article 'Standardising care of the dying: An ethnographic analysis of the Liverpool Care Pathway in England and the Netherlands' by Erica Borgstrom and Natashe Lemos Dekker is published in Sociology of Health & Illness.

A tenacious postdoc researcher persuaded Professor Marc Koper to research the oxygen reduction reaction. In Koper's eyes, there was little of interest there. But they promptly discovered a whole new way to improve fuel cells on hydrogen and oxygen. Their article appeared in Nature Catalysis on 07 Ju…

In order to test theoretical expectations concerning individual decision-makers' search in response to negative performance, Joris van der Voet conceptually disentangles problem-defining and solution-generation as two distinct search objectives.

This research delves into the unique cultural approach of the Tenggerese people, an Indigenous community in East Java, Indonesia, regarding elderly care. It focuses on their traditional practices of bakti (‘filial piety’) and sayan (‘mutual aid’), deeply ingrained in the community's lifestyle and va…

The program group Forensic Family and Youth Care Studies of the Institute of Education and Child Studies deals with the developmental processes of vulnerable children, young people and families.

The focus of health care is rapidly changing. The need for maximum gains with minimal input requires tailored health care strategies and an ever more explicit evaluation of health benefits for the patient.

At the beginning of the corona pandemic, our Faculty appointed student mentors to guide first-year and international students. What drives these mentors, and what is it like to be back at the Faculty again? Mireia and Marten tell us all about it.

PhD defence

The programme group Parenting, Child Care and Development is located in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Leiden University near Central Station.

Within the bachelor's program of Education and Child Studies, we include the minor Kindermishandeling en Verwaarlozing: een levensloopperspectief and several other courses.

The program group Forensic Family and Youth Care Studies is located in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Leiden University near Central Station.

This project investigates ethnographically how patients, their relatives, and healthcare professionals in the Netherlands make decisions about end-of-life care. We study the new dilemmas around what constitutes

Master’s student of Linguistics Marten van der Meulen helped organise the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Miracles of Human Language, which ran from 30 March until 11 May 2015. What was it like for a student to organise an MOOC? And what did he learn from it?

Do you recall all those drugs that were hastily proposed as potential treatments for COVID-19? In the event of a future pandemic, the goal is to offer an effective treatment more quickly and efficiently. To achieve this, a team led by Coen van Hasselt is developing a platform that can speed up the process…

A signal that is present both in the centre of our Milky Way and in distant places in the universe could reveal the origin of dark matter. This is what Leiden physicist Alexey Boyarsky concludes in an article in Physical Review Letters.

Through a lens that examines the intersection of ageing, gender, class, and migration, this project addresses the “care deficit” in European countries and the employment of migrant women from Latin America to fill this deficit.

Ambient sound is a standard term used by sound practitioners to denote the site-specific background sound component that provides a characteristic atmosphere and spatial information in a sound work.

With the rise of multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens, the possibility of a post-antibiotic world is quickly becoming reality.

Describing almost 1400 maps of Africa in three months. It’s no small task that student assistants Artemis Mantheakis and Beatriz Veiga have been working on within the joint ASCL-UBL Africa Maps Project. The project’s aim is to describe and catalogue a 20th-century map collection of the library of the…

What are the manifestations, antecedents and consequences of the cognitive uncertainty experiences of social care professionals?

Many parents whose children have been placed in care do not understand the basis on which the decision was taken. Dutch youth protection organisations and the Child Protection Council must better document why they request such a measure from the Juvenile Court.

On Tuesday, September 16, 2025, Professor Elisheva Baumgarten (Hebrew University) delivered a Keynote Lecture at the Leiden Jewish Studies Network Conference “Care and the Jewish Experience".

Bringing Dominican indigenous collections back to the community

Biological and behavioural measurements of parent-child interactions.

The Liverpool care pathway for the dying patient (LCP) is a multidisciplinary tool developed for the dying phase for use in palliative care settings. The literature reports divergent experiences with its application in a nursing home setting related to its implementation and staff competencies. The…

Search engines are getting better at answering our questions. And chatbots are increasingly likely to search the internet for relevant sources. ‘Search engines and chatbots will become more closely entwined’, says Professor Suzan Verberne.

We will use Artificial Intelligence to make an intelligent, multilingual search engine for archaeological texts, which will enable new discoveries about the human past.

In this thesis we study quantum transport phenomena on the nanometer scale, in two classes of materials: topological insulators with induced superconductivity and graphene superlattices.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a major problem worldwide. Molecular biologist Changsheng Wu explored innovative methods of developing new antibiotics more simply and more easily. He also discovered a new type of antibiotic.

In March 2019, the Institute for Public Administration launched the MOOC Population Health Governance, in collaboration with the LUMC at Leiden University. The MOOC was one of the first modules to became available at the Coursera platform, as part of the ongoing development of the new Master’s programme…

The major aim is to develop, evaluate, and implement disease-generic cognitive-behavioral interventions through the internet in order to optimize tailored health care for patients with chronic somatic conditions.

It is not possible for juvenile courts to properly assess whether it is necessary to place a child in care. This is evident from a fact sheet that has been prepared by legal scholars from Leiden University, commissioned by the Dutch House of Representatives and others.

The collection guides of archives and collections of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) have been made available via the portal Collection Guides. This has greatly improved the findability, visibility and ease of use of these collection finding aids.

When you want to analyse big quantities of archaeological data, you run into the issue that searching through excavation reports is extremely time-consuming. If only there existed a search engine specifically focused on querying these reports… But wait, work on an archaeological search engine focused…

Bacteria carry countless hidden treasures in their DNA: fragments that could hold the key to new medicines. But how do you pick out the most promising ones from millions of options? ‘Look at the switches that turn genes on and off,’ says molecular biologist Gilles van Wezel.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Jessica Vance Roitman and Wouter Veenendaal, researchers at the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, investigate the origins, development, and consolidation of political oligarchy in the Caribbean island nation of St. Maarten.

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How sustainable are open data infrastructures? Will the data we need in the future be available and usable? This project takes COVID-19 data/infrastructures as a case to study the sustainability and dynamics of open data infrastructures.

Which educational and child welfare interventions offer optimal opportunities for positive development to children with severe behavioral and emotional disorders.