Orange the World 2025

Two things are needed to produce fuel from sunlight: an antenna that harvests light, and a light-driven catalyst. The most efficient antennae contain bacteria. An international team headed by Huub de Groot imitated them and discovered how they function.

The LUCAS Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Dr. Renske Janssen for her PhD thesis Religio Illicita? Roman Legal Interactions with Early Christianity in Context.

Three years ago, on 13 October 2017, the Leiden Medievalists Blog was established. In their blogs, Leiden researchers from all disciplines talk about the Middle Ages in a fun and interesting way. Editors Jip Barreveld, Marlisa den Hartog and Thijs Porck talk about the blog and why the Middle Ages are…

More effective diagnosis and prognosis than ever, with less intrusive medical screening? Scientists from Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam are well on the way to achieving just that. Imaging professors Serge Rombouts and Wiro Niessen are working on an extremely rigorous, self-learning adviser for radiologists.…

Alfons Chorus was the ‘founding father’ of Psychology in Leiden. His son Rogier Chorus recently obtained his PhD at Leiden University based on his biography of his father. He talked to his Leiden PhD supervisor Willem Heiser about his father’s innovations, his plagiarism and how he was misunderstood…

How to innovate education? In this series, the Honours Academy highlights examples from their educational testing ground that aim to inspire. Today: pioneering with podcasts. What are the do's and don'ts? Two teachers and a student share their thoughts.

Good, accessible and affordable healthcare is increasingly difficult to provide. Martin Schalij from the LUMC understands that this can keep people awake at night.

Having flirted with Egyptology and Italian, Dieuwertje Kuijpers found her true calling in the Master’s in European Union Studies. She is now a freelance journalist specialising in politics, security and defence. But she is also at home writing columns for ThePostOnline and hard-hitting articles for…

Do you know what the capital of St Eustatius is? Or which province Curaçao belongs to? No idea? You are not the only one: the majority of European Dutch people know little about the Caribbean islands within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This is according to a large-scale opinion survey led by political…

The LUCAS Impact Committee, consisting of Jan van Dijkhuizen, Rick Honings, Casper de Jonge, Angus Mol, Thijs Porck and Aafje de Roest, has offered this year’s LUCAS Public Engagement Award to Dorine Schellens and Peter Verstraten.

Leiden Public Administration alumnus Jeffrey Jonkers negotiates in Syria with the Assad government, civilians and even with IS. The UN peace talks are due to start shortly in Geneva. Jonkers negotiates behind the scenes.

On Tuesday 12 April Angus Mol and Aris Politopoulos have been awarded the fourth LUCAS Publieksprijs.

It is undeniable that the public is central to the practice and study of public diplomacy. Indeed, this field is known as *public* diplomacy.

In June 2016, Dr. Ann Brysbaert and her SETinSTONE team were invited to participate in the fieldwork training season on Salamis island in Greece.

He’s sometimes called Your Safeness. Leiden law alumnus Pieter van Vollenhoven, husband of Princess Margriet and the driving force behind the Dutch Safety Board, returned to the University yesterday for the symposium ‘A critical safety watchdog?’ to mark his 80th birthday. With a host of dignitaries…

Pioneering in the archaeology of Somaliland, hosting international TV and radio shows, and producing a very successful MOOC: Dr Sada Mire already has a formidable track record.

The biweekly Lunch Time Seminar is an online only event, but it is not publicly accessible in real-time. If you would like to attend one of the upcoming sessions, please send an email to sails@liacs.leidenuniv.nl.

PhD defence

Lecture, Astronomy on Tap

Debate

The Faculty of Humanities offers an inspiring international working environment with room for diversity and innovation to staff and students from home and abroad.

The Leiden University Institute for History is responsible for the main part of the historical research carried out at Leiden University. The institute has a wide-ranging academic scope.

Here you can find an overview of the Erasmus+ projects of Leiden University since 2015.

Festival

Lecture, Unfolding Finitudes

Women are are on the agenda again at Leiden University. That was clear on 8 March in the Academy Building. First there was an informal get-together with women professors and talented researchers, followed by the 27th Annie Romein-Verschoor lecture, on happy and angry women.

At the end of a difficult year, students of ACPA’s Music Minor have put together “sonic postcards” to capture their experience of life under Covid restrictions. The result is a powerful, intimate statement about our pandemic fears and hopes.

With great sadness we share the news that Prof. Harold Linnartz passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Sunday 31 December 2023. We are all in shock, and our thoughts are with his wife and children, other family, and friends. Harold was at the heart of our institute, as a researcher, as a supervisor,…

‘Am I setting a good example myself?’ Hanneke Hulst wonders. As Recognition and Rewards project leader, she maintains that we should stop expecting researchers to be experts at everything, even though she herself keeps a lot of balls in the air.

‘People talk at the coffee machine about what’s on the front page of De Telegraaf.’ Kamran Ullah took office as deputy editor-in-chief of De Telegraaf on 1 January this year. Ullah began studying Public Administration at Leiden in 2002.

‘Even at the deepest point in the ocean you can still hear the noise from boats,' says biologist Hans Slabbekoorn. ‘And that's while sound is the most important means of communication for underwater life.' What is the effect of all that underwater noise on fish and other animals? Slabbekoorn is on board…

Data and information should be stored in a way that computers can understand, says Barend Mons, professor of Biosemantics at the Leiden University Medical Center and Chair of the High Level Expert Group for the European Open Science Cloud. We speak with him about FAIR data, knowlets and nanopublicat…

In a sailboat, a canoe or stowed away on a ship: during the Second World War, many Leiden students tried to cross the sea to join the Allies in Britain. ‘Soldier of Orange’ is the most famous, but who were the other ‘England voyagers’ or Engelandvaarders as they are known?

Read all about YAL membership and the members of the Young Academy Leiden.

2021 was an eventful year once again for the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA). Hybrid, working from home, online education, on-campus education, face masks, self-tests, keeping distance, quarantine and the coronavirus. Words that have now become a standard part of our vocabulary when…

In the ESOF2022 mini-symposium organized by the Social Resilience & Security programme, international experts with a background in psychology, philosophy, and law discussed how the online world is related to adolescent mental health issues, moral and emotional awareness and children’s rights. In three…

We talked to Hester Bijl about the worldwide protests sparked off by the death of George Floyd. A demonstration against racism will also be held in Leiden on 14 June. How does she, as Vice-Rector responsible for diversity and inclusion, view this issue? What steps is the University taking? And how can…

Staff from Leiden University are starting the Dutch universities’ staggered strike against the government cuts on 10 March. Follow the strike in this liveblog.

This page contains all relevant information for lecturers teaching in the Astronomy bachelor's and/or master's curriculum at Leiden University.

An age-old expression in Classical Chinese is yǔ zhòng bù tóng 與眾不同, meaning ‘out of the ordinary.’ It could have been the motto of Burchard J. Mansvelt Beck, who taught that language for decades at Leiden University. What was different about him? He was extraordinarily gifted, helpful, and above all…

Over the past year, many of our staff and students have won prizes, been awarded a substantial grant or been appointed to an academic association or a position in public life. All of these are good reasons to include them in our 2018 Hall of Fame. We are proud of them all.