Leiden University provides ambitious students with the most recent and innovative areas of knowledge, and offers them the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Leiden is the ideal city for students. There is a wide variety of activities you can do next to your studies, to make the most out of your student life.

Leiden University provides ambitious students with the most recent and innovative areas of knowledge, and offers them the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Leiden is the ideal city for students. There is a wide variety of activities you can do next to your studies, to make the most out of your student life.

The long term goal of the Biophysical Organic Chemistry/SSNMR group, headed by Prof. Huub de Groot, is to reach an understanding of structure, dynamics and functional mechanisms of membrane proteins and self-organized biological assemblies and to translate this knowledge into new concepts for nano-devices,…

How are we celebrating our anniversary in 2025 on the faculty?

Leiden University provides ambitious students with the most recent and innovative areas of knowledge, and offers them the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Leiden University provides ambitious students with the most recent and innovative areas of knowledge, and offers them the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

The plans for making the University Library (UB) more sustainable will be carried out in three steps: first the glazing at the front of the building will be replaced with HR++ glass, then the skylights will be renewed and finally the air conditioning system will be updated. Once these steps have been…

Speech Prosody 2024 includes three workshops.

Flying is cheaper than driving a car, but a disaster for the environment. Yet few politicians dare to levy excise duty on kerosene. This is only one example from a world where emotions and yelling are burying facts, and in which scientists lose connection with society.

'Find your way from the stars’, an online workshop on Nautical Astronomy, was one of the winners of The Netherlands Online Cultural Challenge 2020. The workshop was conducted in collaboration with the IAU Office for Astronomy Outreach, Leiden University’s Astronomy & Society Group, and the Department…

In 2018, astronomer Jorryt Matthee won the C.J. Kok Jury Prize for the best dissertation of the Faculty of Science. He succeeded in finding a number of rare galaxies from the early Universe. One of them received the same initials as football player Cristiano Ronaldo: CR7.

The James Webb Space Telescope has found evidence of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere of a giant planet 700 light years away. This result provides insight into the composition and formation of this gas giant and shows what James Webb is capable of. The research by the international group of astronomers,…

Leiden and Austrian researchers have succeeded in further uncovering how a plant cell passes on the growth hormone auxin in a directional manner to the next cell. Three proteins that cling together in a bunch appear to be essential for this important transport process. ‘This discovery solves a crucial…

An international team of laboratory astrophysicists and astrochemical modellers has shown that glycine, the simplest amino acid and an important building block of life, can form under the harsh conditions that govern chemistry in space. The results have been published this week in Nature Astronomy and…

Leiden University's International Honours College, Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) experienced empty halls and empty classrooms this past year on the residential campus on the Anna van Buerenplein in The Hague due to the global pandemic. Dr Paul Hudson designed a Covid-proof course that enabled…

‘I already gave a talk about planets when I was five.’ With the theme of the 3 October celebrations being ‘Jong geleerd is oud gedaan’ (meaning something like, ‘You’re never too young to learn’), this year’s 3 October University was especially for children. Many parents came with their offspring to…

You can make some astounding images using just a box with a hole. Inspired by the celebration of Leiden as the European City of Science, Professor Matthew Kenworthy left several pinhole cameras across the Observatory over the course of 2021. This is how the simplest devices may uncover the greatest…

The theme of the Heritage Open Days Leiden on 10 and 11 September is sustainability. At four University locations guides will talk about the history of the buildings and how they have been renovated. And there is a first: tours in sign language.

Seven researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. This will enable them to start their own project, build their research team and put their best ideas into action.

Leiden University archaeologists receive multiple awards for research on interaction between the Greek and Roman world and ‘The East’

This project on the role of FoxPs in vocal perception and production learning is part of nine PhD-positions funded by the NWO Gravitation Programme which was granted to the Dutch Research Consortium 'Language in Interaction'

The many thousands of small celestial bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit may have ended up there due to a star that passed close to the solar system billions of years ago. This is shown by Leiden simulation expert Simon Portegies Zwart, along with his German and Dutch colleagues. ‘We are answering several…

The School for Digital Deaf Studies 2025 is a hybrid school consisting of one week school in person in Ghana (15 - 24 August), followed by a one week school online later this year. It aims for the capacity building needed to expand academic research and education activities in digital Deaf studies,…

This project creates a comprehensive audiovisual documentation of the Sanye language, the sociolinguistic situation, and cultural practices of the Sanye (Dahalo) community in coastal Kenya.

The research master’s programme in Linguistics at Leiden University combines leading expertise with a flexible programme format.

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

We welcome visiting scholars whose research aligns with our diverse areas of expertise.

The Hans Franken Lecture honors the legacy of Prof. Dr. Mr. Hans Franken, a founding figure of eLaw in 1985.

Psycholinguistic research

The Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo offers Dutch language courses for Egyptian adults on a regular basis. These courses aim to provide students with language skills in Dutch, which they can use in everyday life. Therefore you will spend most of your time practicing the language in order to…

Jed Wentz is a University Lecturer at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts of the Leiden University. He earned a PhD from the docARTES programme and his doctoral thesis Gesture, Affect and Rhythmic Freedom in the Performance of French Tragic Opera from Lully to Rameau explored how historical…

Baroque flautist Jed Wentz followed two years of dancing classes in order to develop the right feeling for the gestures required for the Baroque French opera genre ‘tragédie en musique’. In his dissertation, the links between gesture affect and rhythmic freedom in the performance of the tragédie en…

English Language and Linguistics at Leiden University focuses on English language usage and linguistics around the world, including in countries where English is spoken as a second language or as part of a mixed language.

This PhD project investigates the different uses of Mandarin

A team of Leiden astronomers has managed to calculate the first 100 million years of the history of the Oort cloud in its entirety. Until now, only parts of the history had been studied separately. The cloud, with roughly 100 billion comet-like objects, forms an enormous shell at the edge of our solar…