In February 2020 Jed Wentz will start the new course 'Practical Rhetoric: public speaking according to historical sources'. Registration is now open!

Starting 12 December, you will be able to enrol in a new Masterclass Effective Crisis Communication at the Centre for Professional Learning. Where do you start when your organisation's reputation is suddenly under threat? And how do you start and with whom?

Cultural heritage throughout the world is under threat from wars, neglect and looting. Learn more about it during a free online course.

What are the implications for life on Earth of the declining numbers of insects? How does the ever increasing stream of of energy and material flowing through our cities impact the global environmental ? Find out the answers to these and more questions on sustainability in the new monthly lecture series…

Sonja Boas developed new techniques to study vascular growth computationally. The results of her research provide a better understanding into mechanisms behind vascular growth, which is relevant to the development of medical therapies. She defends her thesis 'Computational modeling of angiogenesis'…

Leiden University is part of a Dutch consortium that will receive 4.7 million euros from NWO to build a facility that makes controlled, thin layers of material. The facility can produce small and large films, something that is globally unique. And that is key to scaling up, for example, new catalysts…

Binary systems, consists of five electronic compositions, in each of which Richard Barrett worked with a specially made recording from an improvising instrumentalist to produce a new kind of compositional collaboration: Daryl Buckley (electric lap steel guitar), Ivana Grahovac (cello), Lori Freedman…

Researchers from Leiden have developed a promising TB vaccine that users can self-administer via a special patch. This could be beneficial for countries with limited health services, says PhD candidate Malene Neustrup.

New Chinese CSC PhD’s are welcomed at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry. On the 28th of September 2012 a three week introduction program started especially for this new incoming group of scientists.

The editorial board of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference welcomes several new members. The coming months they will be preparing the journal's second issue, to be published in February 2014.

On Tuesday 30 September 2025, PhD candidate Jonathan Collins will defend his dissertation A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of the Far-Right Alt-Tech Social Media Movement in Leiden’s Academy Building. His work examines the communication dynamics of far-right communities on alternative…

Anne Marieke van der Wal-Rémy, assistant professor of African History and International Studies, has received a Comenius Teaching Fellow grant of 50,000 euros. She intends to use the grant to set up an online archive of digital primary sources, together with her students. Van der Wal-Rémy: ‘ “Once on…

Scientific Director of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) Hubertus Irth: ‘We test substances and look for new concepts for treating disease.’

Good education is the basis for a fair and sustainable society. To maintain a high level of education, teachers, pupils, lecturers and students need new resources. One of the ways that Leiden University supports them in this is by conducting academic research, largely together with practicing teaching…

During the Masterclass “Archaeology from the Sky”, participating students have used small drones to acquire aerial photos from the Italian landscape of Molise. With sometimes amazing results.

No less than 172 international master students coming from 30 different countries visited the Faculty of Science on 29 August during the OWL: the Orientation Week Leiden.

A new administrative culture. Renewed vigour. More transparency. Will it become reality with the new government? And how do you go about achieving it? By all of us striving to change together: not just politicians, but also stakeholders, civil servants, media, and civilians. That was the conclusion…

Hanne Cuyckens, Michiel Dam, Anja van der Voort, Daan Weggemans and Paul Gobée have joined the Leiden University Teachers’ Academy. Lecturers from the academy can exchange experiences, develop themselves and share their knowledge and expertise with the rest of the university, for example through the…

Proteins organize themselves around our body cells through a self-induced force. They indent the cell membrane, which makes them roll towards each other. This discovery provides new insights into processes like nutritional uptake and brain signaling, as well as into such diseases as Alzheimer’s. Publication…

Historical linguist Lauren Fonteyn is awarded a substantial Digital Infrastructure grant as well as being selected as member of the prestigious Young Academy Leiden (YAL).

To get an idea of the science communication products and research that is possible, a few examples of student projects of recent years are shown below.

Open up a world of opportunities with your master's degree in Archaeology from Leiden University!

An important part of the SCS specialisation is the internship period. Students will get the opportunity to get to know the field and to apply what they have learned during the courses.

The European Union Studies minor includes four core courses that provide students with comprehensive knowledge of the European Union’s institutions, policy process, economy, history, and current challenges. In addition to this, students also choose two electives from a broad portfolio of courses that…

Open up a world of opportunities with your master's degree in Archaeology from Leiden University!

Open up a world of opportunities with your master's degree in Archaeology from Leiden University!

Arts and culture, Q&A

The prosecution of violent fathers is regularly abandoned, supposedly ‘in the best interests of the child’. Assistant professor Mojan Samadi responds in an interview with RTL and Investico: ‘It’s problematic if you accept this argument as a matter of course.’

PhD defence

PhD defence

PhD defence

LUCIS promotes high-quality research on Islam and Muslim societies and actively communicates the insights and findings of that research to the larger public.

A plant that takes metal from the ground all by itself: a natural way to mine or to clean the soil. PhD student Roderick Bouman (Hortus Botanicus Leiden) described a new plant species from Sabah, Borneo, which can be used to extract nickel. In an open access article in Botanical studies, he and the…

The Executive Board of Leiden University has appointed the new Board for the Faculty of Archaeology. Read more about their plans for the future of the Faculty.

A new executive board has been installed at NeCEN, a state-of-the art facility that offers the most advanced cryo-electron microscopes worldwide. The new board members are full of excitement: what are their ideas for the future of the facility?

At the end of October, the Steering Committee, headed by Dean Mark Rutgers, gave the green light for the development of the new Faculty Strategic Plan for 2021-2026. How does this process go?

Kajsa Ollongren, Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, opened a complex of 467 student flats in Leiden on 26 August. This is the (Y)ours development on the sustainable ‘Leidse Schans’ campus at Lammenschans train station.

On Safer Internet Day (Tuesday 6 February), UNICEF Netherlands organised a symposium on the theme of 'Children's rights in the digital world' in collaboration with Leiden University and Kennisnet. Simone van der Hof and Ton Liefaard contributed to the symposium.

There is much wrong with the taxonomy of the plant genus Phyllanthus. Roderick Bouman of the Hortus botanicus Leiden has developed a new phylogeny for Phyllanthus and exposes the evolution of the plant genus. Publication in TAXON.

Plants are able to resist a pathogen’s attack by a dual innate immune system. The relationship between the two pathways was not clear, but it turns out that they mutually potentiate each other, as assistant professor Pingtao Ding (Institute of Biology Leiden) and colleagues (The Sainsbury Laboratory,…

Three new PhD candidates at the Faculty of Humanities will receive funding from the Programme Office Sustainable Humanities and NWO. The aim of the grant is to boost young talent within the humanities.

How will future technological developments influence our everyday lives? This is the key question during the Brave New World symposium on 2 and 3 November.

Cookware handles, electrical plugs, brake pads. Unlike other plastics, these ‘thermosets’ cannot simply be melted down and reshaped, making them difficult to recycle. Chemist Roxanne Kieltyka and her team are now exploring a way to make these materials recyclable, potentially transforming the way we…

On September 1 2017, Marlou Grobben ends her term as assessor of the faculty board of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. After a two- year period, having represented the student- interests within the faculty board, the position is transferred to Esmee Braam.

The recent consecration of India’s Ayodhya temple by Prime Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party figurehead Narendra Modi raises important questions. Is secularism giving way to religious rule in the world’s largest democracy? How does this resonate with India’s culturally diverse population? France 24…

A new regional atlas, with information about the presence of pesticides in surface waters, has been developed by the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) in collaboration with Royal Haskoning DHV. The aim of the regional pesticide atlas is to support decision making at local and regional levels,…

Michiel van der Vaart with a team from Leiden University and the LUMC, led by IBL-researcher Annemarie Meijer, discovered that DRAM1 is a protein that regulates anti-bacterial autophagy, a defense mechanism against infections such as tuberculosis.

The particle accelerator of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, produces large amounts of complex data with high accuracy, as a result of which theoretical predictions also need to be more accurate and faster. With his research team, PhD candidate Ben Ruijl developed very innovative…

If computers work on superconducting current, they won’t consume any energy. Leiden physicists have now gained control over a new type of superconducting memory elements. Publication in Nature Communications.

'Adjacent Sound' is the new album by composer and ACPA PhD Gabriel Paiuk.