Academic staff and students blog about their research and teaching.

The following maps show institutional collaborations and with indigenous communities (scroll down).

Research on the morality of life insurance. What issues are raised when insurance companies define responsibility and solidarity? Has insurance changed since the crisis of 2007?

This project investigates the full ecosystem of Middle Dutch prayerbooks in order to answer questions about their role in – and impact on – religion, culture, and society in the late medieval Low Countries.

We are cosmologists, in other words we use physics to study the Universe, how it started and evolved into the structure that we observe around us.

Through his project we will unravel the global regulatory networks that control gene expression in Streptomyces bacteria and allow them to properly respond to major changes in the environment; we will then harness this knowledge to activate and identify novel antibiotics

In this dossier you can read about Leiden University’s commitment to sustainability.

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research in astronomy and excellent teacher education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized MSc degree and teaching qualification.

Twelve researchers of our Law School have been awarded an ILS seed money grant. This grant enables researchers to create space for preparing a grant proposal for NWO, ERC or otherwise.

North, Middle and South America together constitute the single largest area in World Archaeology that is taught as a single focus. It is also the only major world area that saw societies develop from hunter-gatherers to early empires entirely independent from developments in Eurasia & Africa. It is,…

In early modern Europe, as today, men and women with expertise in languages were indispensable to the functioning of societies and economies. The LangPro project will shed new light on these early modern language professionals and on the field that employed them: the language sector.

How did people in the latter part of the Late Bronze Age organize themselves in order to be able to erect massive structures such as tholos tombs, citadels and how did they interact with these materials and circumstances while constructing? What impact did such a changing landscape have on their day-to-day…

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

A linguistic prehistory of the Tarim Basin in Northwest China

Research

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2018, as well as special appointments and royal distinctions.

On this page you will find an overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2025, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

The European Research council (ERC) was founded ten years ago today. The ERC is an important agency for research funding, including to Leiden University.

Uniting an international consortium of scholars, the Skandapurāṇa Project comprises a team of researchers working in fields across the Humanities. We are creating a critical edition of a foundational work of purāṇic literature and, in doing so, tracing the dynamics of a textual tradition to better understand…

Paul Brakefield, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the Institute of Biology in Leiden (IBL) has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his research. He will receive 2.5 million euro to develop his research programme over a period of five years.

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2017, as well as special appointments and royal distinctions.

The ARTIVES project studies imaginaries of diversity portrayed by artists in Lisbon and Rotterdam in their films, performances and (oral) literature with the aim to explore their transgressive potential of opening up possibilities of thinking differently about migration-related diversity. Their stories…

Professor of Developmental Biology Christine Mummery and chemist Dr Dennis Hetterscheid have each been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept grant. These grants are to explore the societal potential of ideas generated in previous ERC-funded projects.

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

Assessing the feasibility and legitimacy of the current model of global tax governance and the role of the OECD and EU in international tax law-making.

The Food citizens? team has included two post-docs, three Ph.D. candidates and two research assistants working with the Principal Investigator. The Winter School involved nine Masters and Ph.D. candidates from the universities of Bologna, Gothenburg, Kaunas, Leiden, Louvain, Tromsø, Turin and Utrech…

Fundamental knowledge generated through research increases our scientific and cultural knowledge and wealth, and offers an important basis for developing and innovating products and services, and for deciding how we should structure our society.

What workflow of non-destructive techniques provides accurate, valuable data to improve our understanding of Caribbean archaeological landscapes? How were Amerindian settlements configured?

Would you like to develop further and be challenged academically in your field or beyond? The Faculty of Humanities offers a wide range of courses to boost your career, learn new skills or broaden your knowledge.

Indigenous Latin American artifacts have attracted the interest of Europeans since the earliest moment of contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The ERC-funded BECACO project uses an innovative multidisciplinary framework to investigate the provenance of ethnographic and…

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

Microbes influence and respond to other organisms. This theme explores the dynamic relationships within plant and animal microbiomes, and the immune responses that govern host defense. Using model systems such as zebrafish, insects, and plants, we investigate fundamental processes and engineer microbes…

Research framework CIAS

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent business education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized MSc degree prepared for technological business challenges.

The two-year Astronomy and High-Tech Innovation master’s specialisation places you at the heart of the latest astronomical discoveries, cutting-edge instrumentation, high-precision measurements, and innovative technologies in advanced instrumentation engineering. The programme is supported by researchers…

By integrating world-class scientific research and education, you will become a professional physicist with an internationally recognized degree.

Leiden Early Drug Discovery & Development (LED3) is a multidisciplinary research network at Leiden University dedicated to advancing innovative approaches in early drug discovery and development. The initiative brings together 58 principal investigators from four institutes—the Institute of Biology…

The central aims of this project are to establish the shapes of the various urban hierarchies existing in the provinces of the Roman Empire and (especially) to use the quantitative properties of these hierarchies to shed new light on levels of economic integration.

Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) is an internationally oriented institute for research and education in biology. We are part of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University.

By effectively integrating word-class scientific research and excellent education, you will become a professional astronomer with an internationally recognized degree.

Transparency is seen as an important value for democratic government policy. Does that mean that we should do away with state secrets, such as confidential information involving intelligence agencies and political deals made behind closed doors? Political philosopher and ERC grant recipient Dorota Mokrosinska…

Our university labs are bursting with cutting-edge research, but how do you commercialise these inventions and discoveries or translate them into outcomes that benefit society? Professor of biological chemistry Nathaniel Martin started a spin-off company with his team. ‘When it comes to valorisation…

In 2020, many of our staff and students have again won prestigious prizes and been awarded important research subsidies.

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is an independent institute within the Leiden University Humanities Faculty. A Management Team, consisting of an Academic Director, a Director of Education and an Institute Manager, is responsible for the overall running of the institute. This team is…