Antimicrobial drugs constitute a fundamental part of modern medicine. The global rise in antimicrobial resistance poses a major threat to global health.

Preventing viral infections from being transmitted through blood transfusion and organ transplantation lies at the heart of the work of medical microbiologist and virologist Mariet Feltkamp and her team.

IBL-researcher Phil Elks in the group of Annemarie Meijer won the Cell Observatory Publication of the Year 2013. He received the award for his paper in PLoS Pathogens, showing that activation of hypoxia signaling protects against mycobacterial infection.

Optimised antibiotic combinations can combat bacteria more effectively while also slowing the development of resistance. Scientists from five European countries are joining forces to identify such combinations and provide tools for others to do the same. The project is led by Professor Coen van Hasselt…

As part of the ZonMW Antibiotics resistance funding program, the LACDR cluster Systems Pharmacology was awarded €455.255 for a research project to develop novel clinical biomarkers for bacterial infections.

Tuberculosis bacteria survive by hiding in our immune cells. In her PhD research, biologist Salomé Muñoz Sánchez explores how boosting the body’s own defenses might outsmart this deadly pathogen. Her work reveals two key proteins that help immune cells destroy the bacteria.

Living systems scale from unicellular microbes to complex multispecies communities that constantly change over time. Within the theme Development & Disease, we enhance our fundamental understanding of development and homeostasis of living cells and systems. We analyze the normal situation and how stresses…

We investigate the molecular basis underlying health and disease and provide answers to existing and emerging health problems. Within this theme, we study diseases ranging from rare genetic disorders to cancer and infectious diseases. We make use of a wide variety of model systems and pursue diverse…

How is inflammation in tuberculosis controlled by interplay between autophagy and inflammasome signalling?

The research described in this Thesis was aimed at designing and synthesizing nature-inspired compounds as part of TB vaccine discovery.

This project investigates how people choose linguistic forms like questions or statements in everyday speech.

Are you looking for a research project?

When a baby is born too soon, every minute counts – and so does every decision. To reduce uncertainty in those critical moments, biopharmaceutical scientist Manchu Umarani Thangavelu dedicated her PhD to identifying molecular markers of preterm birth and neonatal infection.

More than 1.3 million people worldwide die of tuberculosis (TB) each year, making research on its prevention and control essential. Researchers from various disciplines in Leiden are studying TB. A symposium on 24 March will highlight different activities in the hope of boosting nationwide collabora…

This thesis describes the use of a combined approach of computational and experimental techniques to gain novel insights to understand the glycosylation reaction and its reactive intermediates.

This special issue explores social meaning from the perspective of current theories in pragmatics.

PhD defence

The aim of this thesis was to study phage infection in Streptomyces, focused on cell wall-deficient cells. Bacteriophages (or phages in short) attach to the cell wall of bacteria after which they replicate and lyse the host cell.

Control of infectious diseases poses continuous challenges for human health.

Researchers at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Radboud university medical center have been given the green light to deliberately infect volunteers with malaria in order to test a highly promising vaccine on them.

How can we enhance inspiration in metric modal improvisation and subsequently, in modal composition?

An overview of new research project: Politeness in Arabic Papyrus Letters

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study.

These are our lecturers (in alphabetical order) for the 2026 Summer School in Languages and Linguistics.

Conference, Workshop

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2022, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

Leiden University and Leiden University Medical Center have joined the Netherlands Centre for One Health (NCOH), further strengthening the academic network in which such problems as antimicrobial resistance are studied.

The current resurgence of whooping cough is alarming, and improved pertussis vaccines are thought to offer a solution. Outer membrane vesicle vaccines (omvPV) are potential vaccine candidates, but omvPV-induced humoral responses have not yet been characterized in detail.

Promotor: G.F.A. Kersten, W. Jiskoot, Co-promotor: B. Metz

This thesis focuses on two processes involved in fighting infections: metabolism and immune cell motility and navigation.

Health workers have always sought ways to fight disease in vulnerable groups in the population. It is now clear that such research also benefits more prosperous countries. African worm infections and innovative thermometers have shown Leiden researchers how to fight diseases of affluence and keep health…

How can efficient chemical synthesis and clinical microbiology be combined to identify new antibiotics against Clostridioides difficile infections?

No less than four Leiden research teams have been awarded a grant by NWO. On 27 July NWO honoured 21 applications in the Open Competition ENW-XL. NWO awards the grants to consortia in the exact and natural sciences who are doing unconnected fundamental research that is 'driven by curiosity'.

Promotor: C.A.M.J.J. van den Hondel, Co-promotor: Sandra de Weert

In STAYAHEAD data-intensive approaches are being developed to ”decode the human immunome” with a focus on a global vaccine strategy. They have developed a rapid mass spectrometric test to analyse in real-time large numbers of variants of SARS-CoV-2 and the host immune response, and use these data to…

Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Oncode have created a tracking system that can reveal how often cells have divided. This allowed them to find a yet undiscovered population of immune cells: young memory cells that behave like stem cells.…

The outbreaks of AIDS and COVID-19 showed clearly how infectious viruses can influence people’s lives. Investigating the changes in the host metabolism may provide a paradigm shift to consider immune-metabolic interactions as therapeutic targets.

The Examination Board of the Honours Academy determines whether the student meets the requirements of the relevant honours programme and handles requests for exceptions.

A research into how people eat and drink during their daily routines, and the circumstances under which these activities take place.

By drawing on the personal experiences of contributors based in different institutions and countries, the articles in this special issue provide a fairly broad overview of ethics practices and concerns in different localities (though not globally, as we had originally hoped), showing, as one student…

When combined and used by specific people located in time and place, words can express something more than, different from, or even the opposite of their dictionary meanings.

Semantics and pragmatics are united in the study of linguistic meaning.

How do social and political developments influence the process of meaning-making in different parts of the world? Why is a particular discourse interpreted in numerous ways depending on the context it is produced and propagated? And how are culture, politics, history, and language intertwined?

From corpus pragmatics and metapragmatics to accountability and intentions, and from conversational structure and im/politeness to the role of emotions in utterance interpretation, the short articles collected here represent not just the wide scope of Michael's own work but also a snapshot of the field,…