How can we explain that Caribbean small states have the most stable two-party systems in the world, while Pacific small states have either very weak parties or no parties at all? Matthew Louis Bishop (University of Sheffield, UK), Jack Corbett (University of Southampton, UK) and Wouter Veenendaal (Leiden…

Training students to become medical professionals is an important task of a university medical centre. But teaching does not always receive the space and recognition it deserves. This needs to change, says Professor Alexandra Langers. Medical education is a profession in its own right.

Does suffering suffice? Andrei Poama, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, and Paul C. Bauer, research fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, did an experimental assessment of desert retributivism. Their resulsts were published on April 20 on PLOS ONE.

Jaroslaw Kantorowicz examines how strategic climate litigation influences public attitudes on climate policy, using a UK experiment to explore legal cues.

Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

When a star is born in our Galaxy, it is quite likely that it has formed within a massive cluster, which hosts numerous high-mass stars bathing their lower mass neighbours in UV radiation.

This thesis describes the development and validation of new high-contrast imaging techniques, with the ultimate goal of enabling the next generation of instruments for ELT-class telescopes to directly image Earth-like extra-solar planets orbiting around nearby stars.

Promotor: Prof.dr. E.F. van Dishoeck, Co-Promotor: M.R. Hogerheijde

A team of European astronomers under Leiden leadership has discovered that dust particles around a star already coagulate before the star is fully grown. These agglomerated dust particles are the first step in the formation of planets. The research publish their discovery in the journal of Nature As…

Civil service systems are often targets of criticism globally. This article seeks to fill an evidence void about government performance and meritocracy

In romantic love, we often invoke an idiom of infinity—for instance, when we promise to love each other forever, or declare the other to be the one. But what does this metaphysical appeal signify? And how can such a promise of infinite love be made within the bounds of a finite life? In attempt to answer…

The smallness of Suriname, according to political scientist Wouter Veenendaal (Leiden University), strongly affects and shapes the nature of democracy in the country. On the one hand, clientelism ensures that members of each ethnic group included in power-sharing arrangements have access to state resources…

In this article, Honorata Mazepus, assistant professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, and Dimiter Toshkov, associate professor at the Institute of Public Administration, discuss whether the winner–loser gap extends beyond the political domain to subjective health and well-being as…

What if you could watch a single cell eat in real time? This could answer questions about diseases such as cancer. PhD candidate Yixuan Wang has developed a glowing chemical tool that makes this possible, revealing how living cells take in nutrients.

An international team of astronomers including Leiden scientists publishes the image of a young star with a surrounding dust disk that is still being fed from its surroundings. The phenomenon around the star SU Aur may explain why so many exoplanets are not neatly aligned with their star. The European…

Research at Leiden Observatory spans the full width of modern astrophysical enquiry. It is based on observation, theory, simulation, and experiment. Two broad clusters characterize the ongoing research. Within each theme, researchers carry out their personal and specialized research programme. The two…

Xin Zhang, PhD at ICLON, researched the relationship between teachers’ learning motivation and the quality of their teaching. Defence on 6 July.

Could water be present in planet-forming disks before the formation of rocky planets? The James Webb Space Telescope may have found evidence for that. Webb has for the first time observed water in the inner disc around young star where at greater distance, giant planets have already formed. The research…

Does the university invest into fossil fuels? ⠀

With his ice-cold nano force sensor, Tjerk Oosterkamp searches for the boundary between the quantum world and the everyday world. The Leiden physicist has received an NWO subsidy of 600,000 euros.

How can we best treat infectious diseases in people with obesity? Hospital pharmacist and PhD researcher Koen van Rhee studied how obesity affects blood levels of two commonly used medicines. He also developed a method for pharmaceutical companies to test new drugs on this patient group.

This article by Kohei Suzuki and his co-authors examine the relationship between job security, at-will employment, and employee outcomes in the public sector amid growing reforms and politicisation.

Our previous meta-analysis (Swart et al., 2019) had shown that feedback targeting text comprehension given when students perform a reading task positively influences learning from text. So far, differences in the effects of feedback were explained by design features, such as the timing and richness…

It is almost two and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine, but the conflict between the two countries has been going on for much longer. Central to it is the question of what it means to be Ukrainian. Guest researcher Viktoriia Ryhovanova teaches a course on the subject. Last academic year, the…

Stefan de Jong is Knowledge Broker at Luris. But what does Luris actually do? And what is a Knowledge Broker? This week we take a closer look at Stefan’s work.

With 8.9 million euros from the Danish National Research Foundation, Aarhus University and Leiden Observatory will establish the Center for Interstellar Catalysis. The centre is led by Aarhus professor Liv Hornekær and aims to find out how and when the building blocks of life formed in the Universe.…

While investigating 16 years of images of young stars from a retired astronomical camera, Leiden master's student Sam de Regt discovered that two of those stars were still enveloped in birth clouds. Never before has anyone captured these two stars in so much detail. He publishes his data-cleaning method…

As of October, Joeri Reinders has joined the Leiden Teachers’ Academy, a group of innovative lecturers who each receive a €25,000 grant for projects focused on educational innovation. For Joeri, this revolves around sustainability and climate change.

On 5 May we celebrate freedom, a basic human right that should not be taken for granted. We asked international students and staff what it means to them.

Rianne Vink, one of the student counsellors, explains what a student counsellor does.

How does audio-visual material shape the identity of people when those people do not own their own land and are being oppressed? Bahar Simsek delved into the effect of film on the Kurdish identity. She will obtain her PhD on 4 May.

Public procurement is not a hot topic for the average citizen. That’s a pity, says PhD candidate Erik Plas, who did research on the fair spending of public money: 'If a council project goes completely haywire, because it costs more than expected, it could even mean that local taxes will have to be r…

Following years of negotiations between Member States and the European Parliament, there’s finally been a breakthrough for migration policy. What does it mean for the Netherlands, exactly? Mark Klaassen, Assistant Professor in Immigration Law, discusses this on various media channels.

All the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun in an ecliptical plane. This is to be expected because our solar system was formed from a so-called protoplanetary disc. PhD candidate Anna Miotello has studied these kinds of discs and how they influence the formation of stars and planets. PhD…

A clear, unambiguous definition of an extraparliamentary cabinet still seems to be missing in the political arena of The Hague. Caroline van der Plas, Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) party leader, wants to discuss this issue with the party chairs of the Dutch coalition parties. Wim Voermans, Professor…

How do local, non-institutional ideas about end-of-life care influence professional palliative care and vice versa? These questions will be answered by medical anthropologists Annemarie Samuels and Natashe Lemos Dekker in the coming years.

The book: Hegemony and World Order: Reimagining Power in Global Politics will be published this week. Jan Aart Scholte: 'We hope that students, lecturers and policy makers will start to think differently because of this book'

No evidence found that increasing migration leads to an increase in politically and ideologically motivated criminality. Migration flows have, however resulted in increased polarisation in the Netherlands.

With the long lockdown, it’s been a hard year for Leiden businesses. How can the local economy bounce back and how can the University help? Two talk shows discussing this were recently recorded in the Academy Building. They will be aired on Unity TV on 28 September and 12 October.

Hardly ever before have different groups in the population retreated into their own bubble as much as they are doing today. Professor of Sociology and Law Maartje van der Woude and her students will be examining the effect of social distancing on relationships. How do the people of Leiden look at students…

The way in which written language is processed in the brain is a hot topic in cognitive research. Cognitive psychologist Rinus Verdonschot studied a Japanese script in which a single character can have up to three possible pronunciations. He discovered that all three are simultaneously activated in…

How can we improve the everyday sounds of the city? In his inaugural lecture on 28 November Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture, advocates using the expertise of sound artists to raise the quality of acoustic environments in cities.

In a lecture for the University of the Netherlands, Reijer Passchier, assistant professor in constitutional and administrative law, speaks about the state of our democracy. ‘Is it not time to upgrade our democracy?’

Joana Cook talks about the Islamist parties increasingly taking power in the last four decades on ABC News.

Today is the general election in the Netherlands – although the polling stations have actually been open for two days already because of the coronavirus restrictions. Leiden researchers and students are involved in all manner of ways, and are analysing the campaigns and possible results.

An international team of researchers, including scholars from Leiden University, has received a Seed Funding Grant within the Una Europa network. The project, Democracy and AI, focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence on the functioning of democratic systems.

Different groups can have different memories of the same historical event. This can lead to conflict but does not have to. How is this, and how can countries and people reconcile with the past?

An international team of scientists, including Xander Tielens of Leiden Observatory, has used space telescope Hubble and the ALMA observatory to show that UV radiation from massive stars can prevent planets from forming. The researchers publish their findings on 1 March in the journal Science.

Child marriage has become an increasingly important topic on the international human rights and development agenda. Many organisations are calling for a ban, but what problem would such a ban solve? PhD defence on 18 March 2020.