On this page, you will find the recordings of the online This Week's Discoveries from May 12, 2020, as well as a list of speakers since October 2015.

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.

Hoe ver mogen demonstranten gaan? En moet de politie ingrijpen als iemand zich vastketent? Jeroen ten Voorde, hoogleraar straf- en procesrecht, sprak met Omroep Gelderland over het demonstratierecht: ‘Ik zou niet meteen zeggen dat het strafbaar is.’

On the 1st of October a new project funded by the Joint Industry Programme (JIP) started at the IBL on the potentially negative effects of sound on fish. Behavioural biologist and bioacoustic specialist Dr. Hans Slabbekoorn leads the international research team.

What are the capabilities or limitations of traveling between islands and how does this reflect seasonal variation? Is it possible to show higher levels of connectivity between islands based on generated pathways between several sites on two separate islands?

Target selectivity is an important aspect of any drug molecule, and certainly a parameter to be optimized. That is not trivial for a number of reasons. First of all hundreds of drug targets (receptors, enzymes, ion channels) exist, and no single lab in the world has assays for all of them.

Archaeologist Eduardo Herrera Malatesta reflects on the unfamiliarity with the pre-Columbian past that he encountered during fieldwork in the Montecristi province in the Dominican Republic.

Anybody can imagine how difficult it is to read a 2000 years old text for the first time. It is almost inevitable that at first mistakes are made in deciphering and interpretation. This is why revision and correction of published texts play an important role within Papyrology.

Subproject of

The Cleveringa chair was installed by Leiden University in memory of Professor Rudolph Pabus Cleveringa and the courage he demonstrated in November 1940 during the German occupation . It also commemorates the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945.

More than fifty researchers are working together to describe the colonisation of the Americas from the Amerindian perspective. In November they will be meeting for the first time, in Leiden. How is Corinne Hofman, Leiden Professor of Archaeology managing the international megaproject Nexus 1492?

Thomas Mes defended his thesis on 9 January 2018.

Effectiveness of an early intervention program for anxiety-prone toddlers in the Netherlands

Százhalombatta-Földvar is a Bronze Age fortified tell settlement on the right bank of the river Danube, 30 km south of Budapest in Hungary. It is one of the best preserved temperate climate tells in Europe and well-known for the extraordinarily rich data it produces. Since 2014 Leiden students are welcomed…

How do teachers conceptualise, develop and implement an effective CLIL practice?

In 1989 the Board of Governors and the Council of Leiden University granted the establishment of a special Chair for Central European Studies with a focus on Austria: 'Lehrstuhl für mitteleuropäische Studien mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Österreichs'.

The research group on governance of crises studies phenomena, dynamics and actors related to crisis governance. The Leiden University Crisis Research Center (CRC) is part of this Research Group.

Study information

Leiden heritage expert Sjoerd van der Linde is carrying out research on the heritage of the Caribbean region. This research forms part of the international Nexus 1492 project on the consequences of colonisation for the Americas. ‘We first have to find out what the local population wants.'

While offshore wind farms generate clean and green energy, scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the harmful impact they may have on marine life. To get a better overview of these impacts and to find the best locations for future wind farms, environmental scientist Yali Si and her colleagues…

Below you will find an overview of the publications of The Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic.

The mission of the Plant Science research programme is to contribute to the sustainable production of high quality crops, flowers and high-value bio-based products. This is realised by generating fundamental knowledge of basic biological processes related to development of plants and their interaction…

Utilization of plant-originated products as new antibiotics

FluidKnowledge will investigate the past, present and future of evaluating ocean science. Regarding the past, it will ask how research priorities in ocean science evolved until now. Which lines of inquiry became hot topics, and which died out? Who became global players, who ended up in the periphery?…

Do natural soundscapes affect migratory decisions of fishes moving up and down rivers and is this process disturbed by vessel sounds?

We investigate water quality and want to understand the effects of human interference on aquatic biodiversity.

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

Jed Wentz realized a unique concept: 19-th century melodramas for voice and piano.

We are happy to announce that the following missions have been approved by the Ministry of Antiquities, pending final security confirmations:

On the evening of Tuesday January 31st, the physics institute organizes its triannual meeting for over seventy high school teachers. The program consists of lectures on developments in modern physics and the latest initiatives in the world of education.

This research project is an integral part of its mother-programme NEXUS1492 ERC Synergy Project directed by Prof. Corinne Hofman. Overarchingly, it aims at understanding and bridging from the archaeological perspective the late pre-colonial and early colonial history of the Southeastern Caribbean macroregion…

The research programme of the Prehistoric Farming Group (European Prehistory) has several research projects. The largest and longest in terms of continuity is the Maaskant project directed by prof. dr. Harry Fokkens.

List of Kloosterman professors

Research on the global field of museums, heritage, commemoration, consumption and material culture

PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Golm – Germany

This part entails the analysis of an extensive sample of animal bone (c. 30,000 pieces) retrieved from well-defined archaeological contexts of the early period at Tell Sabi Abyad, c. 6800-6200 BC. It comprises aspects of taphonomy, ageing and osteometry, the reconstruction of the local spectrum of domestic…

The current migration flow into Europa demands effective measures. Leiden experts examine whether these measures are legal and hold up a mirror to policy-makers.

On November 1st, 2024, professor Johan Kuiper will retire and be appointed as emeritus professor at Leiden University. Since November 2008, Johan Kuiper was professor of Therapeutic Immunomodulation in the division of, at that time, Biopharmaceutics (which later on became the division of BioTherapeutics)…

With a success rate of approximately one in ten, receiving an ERC Starting Grant is a notable achievement. Recently, the European Commission announced that Sarah de Rijcke successfully applied for the project FluidKnowledge.

On 1 March, Lennart Schada von Borzyskowski will start on a tenure track position at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL). With a focus on the natural and synthetic biochemistry of environmental bacteria, he wants to apply their features to health and sustainability issues.

This research deals with the royal houses of the Vijayanagara Empire and four of its successor states: Ikkeri, Tanjavur (under both the Nayaka and Bhonsle rulers), Madurai, and Ramnad. This study is thus concerned with dynastic politics and imperial legacies in south India between the 14th and 18th…

A thousand-year-old tooth has provided genetic evidence that the so-called

A new study published in Archaeometry describes the unexpected results obtained from analyses of five human teeth discovered in a ritual cache at an enslaved African plantation site on the island of Saba in the Caribbean.

Since August 2017, dr. Sarah Schrader is working at the Faculty of Archaeology in the department of Archaeological Sciences. Her expertise is human osteology with a specific focus on the bio-archaeological reconstruction of daily activities. Recently she took over the management of the Osteoarchaeology…

Overview of the publications of the department of Environmental Biology (1972-2015)

A multiple isotope approach to human-animal dynamics in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide

As part of the NEXUS1492 project, this project will use ancient DNA techniques to shed new light on the demographic and health history of the Caribbean and the impact of European colonization on indigenous communities in the region.

Bones contain information about people’s lives such as where they came from, their age at death and which diseases they suffered from. Researchers can deduce a lot from them about a person’s life and about human evolution. This generates leads that could help solve present-day problems, such as how…