Archaeologist Professor Jan Kolen has been appointed Director of the LDE Center for Global Heritage and Development (CGHD) with effect from 1 July 2013. This new inter-university heritage center is due to start in the autumn of 2013 within the framework of the strategic alliance between Leiden University,…

Now the introduction weeks can go ahead as usual, the new students’ enthusiasm is overwhelming. It’s back to normal for the student associations too, having had a hard time of it during the pandemic.

Marco van Eijk is the new Educational Director of the Bachelor's Life Science and Technology (LST). Since 1 September he has been responsible for ensuring the quality of the programme. ‘LST is a unique programme and everyone has to keep working hard for that. That is my main task.’

Vincent Mul is deputy president on the board of The Hague Court of Appeal. Together with Jan Crijns, Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, he stood at the cradle of the collaboration between Leiden Law School and The Hague Court of Appeal. ‘By joining forces, we all benefit.’

During last summer, the Faculty of Law offered an Honours Class about the theme 'Governing Crime and Migration'. Hillary Mellinger, one of the participating international students, tells us about her experiences.

2021, again, sees a rich harvest of bachelor theses in Political Science. Students have been tackling fascinating subjects—ranging from European solidarity in the COVID-19 crisis to the representation of women in democratically elected parliaments—and crowning their research projects with interesting,…

Tensions are rising between Russia and the West. Can an invasion of Ukraine and an international war be avoided? Political scientist and Russia expert Hans Oversloot warns of the consequences if the West chooses a collision course. ‘Offer Russia a dignified exit strategy.’

The archaeologists have been working from home three weeks now. Remotely, through Teams, we meet up with Miguel John Versluys’ research team, to see how they continue working in times of corona.

Leiden University publishes the highest percentage of preprints in the Netherlands. Why is that and why post your article online before it has been peer reviewed? Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and keen preprint poster Ludo Waltman explains.

A love of puzzles and the patience of a saint: these are two essential traits for linguists wishing to explore the Indo-European language family. Fortunately, Professor Michaël Peyrot possesses both. In his inaugural lecture he will take the audience on a voyage of discovery to the past.

The rising energy prices cannot have escaped anyone’s notice. They have dominated the news in recent months. As a university, we too face a big challenge as the prices continue to rise. We will all have to do our bit in the coming months, also in view of the climate crisis that we want to help resol…

Francesco Ragazzi loves to talk about international relations. But what makes him really happy is if his students question the discipline. This has won him a nomination for the LUS Teaching Prize. Is he the best lecturer for 2019?

Professor Anne Meuwese is calling on governments to show more vulnerability when it comes to providing information about how they function.

How can heritage institutions make their organisations, collections and exhibitions more inclusive and accessible? University lecturer Eliza Steinbock will investigate this using a NWO Smart Culture grant.

As an international employee at Leiden University, it can be hard to settle into the workplace, the city, or generally, the Netherlands. The Leiden International Centre can help international employees land comfortably and make living abroad just a little bit easier. Jenny Willcock, coordinator at the…

This variation on Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ is exercising the emotions of the academic world in the Netherlands. Leiden's Vice-Rector, professors and students explain their viewpoints in the alumni magazine Leidraad.

On Friday 30 November 2018 more than 70 students became acquainted with the large range of companies that Leiden Bio Science Park has to offer. In addition to the companies with eye-catching façade names along the cycling route to the faculty, like CHDR, BaseClear and Astellas, there is much more to…

No matter how hard Chinese communists tried to control the economy, they could not stop the free market from flourishing. This was the message given by historian Frank Dikötter on 7 February during a lecture on the Cultural Revolution. He will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate on 8 February.

Studying surfaces of solid materials: it may not seem relevant to energy consumption, but it is. Marcel Rost studies how platinum electrodes wear out. Those electrodes are a crucial component in the fuel cells of hydrogen-powered cars. ‘We need to make the switch from fossil fuel energy to hydrogen.…

A job thanks to COVID—something not many people can claim. But PhD candidate Vera Arntzen can. Over the past four years, she has mapped two crucial characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Thanks to her research, experts can now make well-informed decisions on matters like quarantine duration, which…

In a guest lecture, Senior Vice President at Volvo Penta, Peter Hertinge, shared his lessons on leadership with master honours students of the Leiden Leadership Programme. 'If you set expectations, people will behave accordingly.'

It all started with demonstrations protesting about the death of George Floyd from police brutality in Minneapolis, but the Black Lives Matter protest is spreading like wildfire across the whole of the US. Every day, thousands of people are taking to the streets. We asked American Studies expert Sara…

The staff of the Leiden University Medical Center are doing all they can to help as many corona patients as possible. They are also making regular media appearances to discuss the disease. Below are a few examples.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Beenakker has been awarded a €2m Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). He will use this to try to create the ideal building blocks for a quantum computer: ‘braided’ Majorana fermions. An ambitious project that may just lead to a major breakthrough.

On 3 July, students of the Leiden Leadership Programme received their certificates in the Marekerk church in Leiden. During the festive closing ceremony, it became clear that humanity and leadership go hand in hand. ‘As a leader, you have to listen, observe and acknowledge problems.’

This year, in a three-part symposium series, we are exploring how interdisciplinary collaboration can be promoted at the university. In the second session in March, the attendees discovered that understanding your rhythm and perspective is essential when embarking on an interdisciplinary project.

Limburg lawyer Roger Cox has caused a legal revolution. With high-profile cases against the Dutch state and Shell oil company, he transformed the law into a tool to enforce climate policy. Leidraad alumni magazine spoke to him about a life defined by radical choices for a better world.

A celebration was held in the Tabú restaurant: Mark Rutgers, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, was presented with the first copy of LEAP, a journal where Humanities master’s students can prepare for an academic career by publishing articles themselves.

At the end of March, the first coronavirus infections were detected in southern Africa, which resulted in country after country rapidly closing their borders. Tycho van der Hoog witnessed this process at first hand during his PhD research in Namibia. He analyzes the state of the corona crisis from his…

‘It is a fantastic sum of money,’ enthuses classicist Professor Ineke Sluiter. ‘It gives me not just an award, but a task as well. And in all honesty, I prefer it that way.’ She is already brimming with ideas about what she will do with her Spinoza Prize.

Politicians, public servants and administrators are increasingly expected to be holier than the Pope. This is not necessarily a positive development, in the view of Leiden University lecturer Toon Kerkhoff, who has studied dozens of integrity issues.

Research on papyri has provided new insights into the history of the origins of Islam. Petra Sijpesteijns’s book,'Shaping a Muslim State', is based on these ancient Arabic letters and documents. Her new research on a Viennese collection of untranslated papyri is expected to produce more discoveries.

After a long night of partying, hundreds of people head to Leiden’s Van der Werfpark early on 3 October for a good singsong. Lecturer in Dutch literature Olga van Marion helped compile the new songbook for the occasion. Which songs were left out and which new hits have taken their place?

International Archaeology student Grace Alonzo went back to her home country when the coronavirus situation developed. Now she is living at her parents place in the US, following Leiden lectures remotely, while juggling a tight schedule with a job, and the effect of time difference. ‘I have all my exams…

Discovering effective new drugs is a long, expensive and uncertain process. Laura Heitman wants to improve this by finding out more about how drugs bind to proteins that play a role in disease. She calls it ‘drug discovery 3.0’. Inaugural lecture on 9 December.

You pour a scoop of ditch water in the DNA scanner, and voilà: you know exactly which plants and animals the ditch accommodates. Well, it is not that simple yet, but according to PhD candidate Kevin Beentjes, we can already use DNA techniques to monitor the quality of freshwater. For his PhD research,…

Bringing together chemists and physicists to thoroughly investigate how electrochemical processes work on the smallest scale. That is the goal of the new Advanced Nano-electrochemistry Institute of the Netherlands, or ANION for short. The consortium receives a Gravitation funding of 23.6 million euros…

What will happen if the lights in a large part of the city are switched off? How many stars can you see without all that light pollution? This is what researchers, artists and the residents of Leiden are going to investigate during Seeing Stars Leiden on 25 September. ‘Leiden is the ideal place for…

This year will see the start of not one but two citizen science projects in Leiden and The Hague. This is the outcome of a large survey among residents and researchers in both university cities. The Citizen Science Lab will help the winners implement their ideas, with support from the University and…

Restoring a natural plant environment on exhausted agricultural lands and in nature areas is difficult. We can speed this up by steering the soils towards the desired situation. This is what Martijn Bezemer, newly appointed Professor of Ecology of Plant-Microbe-Insect interactions at Leiden University’s…

Arbeidsuitbuiting van migranten wordt als een vorm van het strafrechtelijke delict mensenhandel beschouwd. De rechtspositie van de slachtoffers is mede daardoor ondergeschikt aan de strafrechtelijke procedure. Dat kan en moet anders, stelt Gerrie Lodder in haar proefschrift. Promotie op 21 april 202…

As part of the celebrations around the 25th birthday of the Faculty of Archaeology, a panel discussion on the future of archaeology was organised on December 13th. For this discussion an international panel of scholars was invited to give their perspective and enter into conversation with our Faculty…

Four talented students will have the opportunity to progress smoothly from their master’s study programme into a research career. Master’s students in Applied Statistics can compete for one quarter of the € 800,000 grant recently awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).…

The life of a students is not always easy and many students find it difficult to share their problems with each other. For that reason, the study advisers and coordinators of studies of Campus The Hague organise the symposium OpenUp!. This event was awarded with the Van Bergen Prize.

With this quote in mind, we organised an alumni event in Brussels for those alumni that live and work in the Brussels Area. 67 mostly young alumni - the majority graduated in the years 2010-2019 - showed up at the beautifully renovated Holland House, situated near the lively Place du Luxembourg (better…

LUCL is pleased to announce that Professor Johan Rooryck has been awarded both an NWO Horizon Grant for his project entitled 'Knowledge and culture', and an NWO Vrije Competitie Grant for his project entitled 'Lend me your ears: the grammar of (un)transferable possession' for a total of €2.75m.

‘Everyone’s talking about it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, but the reality is disappointing,’ says biochemist Gerard van Westen in his 3 October University lecture in the Van der Werfpark. In the full marquee, he gets a laugh with this suggestion that artificial intelligence is comparable…

Human cells are protecting their proteins from unfolding and aggregating. That's what biophysicist Alireza Mashaghi and his team discovered after seven years of in-depth research into the folding mechanisms of proteins. With an unprecedented approach, the team was able to study the folding of a single…

During this last year, most of our efforts and involvement in terms of recruitment activities and events as well as connecting with prospective students, parents and schools has all been moved online. Not a big surprise – this has been the shift for the entire world.

Ward chose to focus on privacy and security because ‘it’s a topic that arouses other people’s interest, though sometimes frightens them, and I really enjoy taking the time to tell people about it’.