On 23 April 2021, Professor Alfred Vertegaal from the Department of Cell and Chemical Biology at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) delivered his inaugural lecture ‘Unraveling and exploiting cellular communication codes’. Vertegaal used the opportunity to describe how research in the field…

On 26 and 27 September 2024, Leiden University's Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies hosted the H2OLAW conference entitled 'Law-science interfaces within the law of the sea and fresh water law’. The conference marked the launch of a multi-year research project led by Dr Hilde Woker and Dr…

Carlotta Rigotti and Christina Pasvanti Gkioka from eLaw – Center for Law and Digital Technologies, have published an article titled 'Overlapping Offences, Divergent Logics: Reconciling EU Law on Sexual Imagery of Minors' in the New Journal of European Criminal Law.

In the fight for a liveable planet, we desperately need a fairer distribution of wealth and equal rights for all, argues anthropology professor Marja Spierenburg. ‘That will also generate broad-based support for sustainable development.’

This part of the research programme is carried out by Prof. Dr. René Cappers. It focusses on the continuities and changes in the use of plants at Late Neolithic Tell Sabi Abyad, as well as on their implications as proxy evidence for the climate change c. 6200 BC. Parallel to the design of the other…

While colloidal aggregates are often undesirable due to their random shapes, we exploit them as a starting point to synthesize patchy particles.

How do pathogenic mycobacteria alter lipid metabolism in human cells and patients, and which disrupted pathways could be targeted for new antibiotics?

In this project, we aim to obtain a quantitative understanding of the role of the immune system in tumor regression, of the role of tumor cell heterogeneity in cancer growth and of tumor cell migration properties.

Leiden and The Hague are home to many museums with large numbers of artefacts and archives. Leiden University also and the Leiden University Library also house special collections. Museums, Collections & Society stimulates research and education and raises ethical questions regarding the collections’…

Isotopic insights on human diet from the later stone age to Neolithic in Northwest Africa, Morocco

The Children’s Rights Monitor provides a thematic overview of the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Netherlands.

Vancomycin is a last-resort antibiotic for the treatment of many Gram-positive bacterial infections, while remaining inactive against Gram-negative strains.

This thesis investigates the contribution of quantum computers to machine learning, a field called Quantum Machine Learning. Quantum Machine Learning promises innovative perspectives and methods for solving complex problems in machine learning, leveraging the unique capabilities of quantum computers…

This omnibus brings together some old and some recent works by Jos Gommans on the warhorse and its impact on medieval and early modern state-formation in South Asia.

In this article, Gerrit Dijkstra and Jos Raadschelders from the Institute of Public Administration, argue that Bosnia-Herzegovina survives so far on the basis of negative legitimacy.

This article reviews how external expertise supports intelligence production and crisis decision-making with Germany's response to the Russio-Ukrainian war.

Building a Deep Cross-media Transfer Network to extract visual relations that relieve the problem of insufficient training data for visual tasks.

Freshwater is an important resource, but at a great risk of species decline due to habitat loss, pollution and over-exploitation, and invasive alien species.

The future of Europe as a community of democratic states is deeply uncertain. The European Union, founded to promote ‘ever closer’ integration, aims nominally for peaceful, prosperous cooperation. But this ideal has been battered by a series of bruising crises, and now by war.

The goal of this study is to systematically investigate how intonation (speech melody) is conveyed in whispered speech.

In this paper for Defence Strategic Communications, Alastair Reed and Jennifer Dowling seek to show the importance of historical narratives to propaganda by identifying and exploring five ways in which such narratives are exploited to reinforce the extremists' 'competitive system of meaning'.

The Children’s Rights Monitor provides a thematic overview of the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Netherlands.

This thesis utilises the exceptional sensitivity and resolution of LOFAR to explore the low-frequency Universe, while simultaneously advancing the telescope's capabilities to enable new scientific discovery.

The CC chemokine receptor 2 (CCR2), a member of the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily, is widely involved in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. However, no drugs for this receptor have made it to the pharmaceutical market yet.

This thesis aims to improve the detection from ultra-weak single emitter by enhancing their emission properties with plasmonic nanostructures. We exploit the wet-chemically synthesized single crystalline gold nanorods (GNRs) as our basic frameworks in the whole studies, simply because of their unique…

One of the main challenges in the development of an effective anti-cancer vaccine is the generation of an adequate and directed cellular immune response.

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.

Inactivating mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes predispose to several types of cancer.

This thesis addresses the problem of designing performance and energy efficient embedded streaming systems, that is, systems which process a stream of input data coming from the environment and generate a stream of output data going into the environment.

Accelerating the diagnosis and personalising the management of inherited metabolic diseases.

Promotor: Prof.dr. J.N. Kok, Co-Promotor: W.A. Kosters

In this thesis I highlight the applications of Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing. This technique is a relatively new approach in the sequencing field, where nanopores are embedded in a membrane, DNA molecules are pulled through nanopores and an electrical current serving as the sequencing…

Painstaking research in Dutch and Portuguese archive materials, so far poorly assessed on the topic of social relations, reveals intense and intricate associations between different European individuals both in terms of ethnicity and social strata.

Tax scandals, like the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, and the Pandora Papers, have made taxation a major topic of public debate. Learn more about this in the new minor Tax and Society: Building a Sustainable and Fair Tax System.

The mission in this division, headed by Laura Heitman, is to design and synthesize novel and better ligands for drug targets. Drug discovery is a lengthy but inspiring adventure. It is often an interplay between academic institutes and pharmaceutical industry, in which scientists at university develop…

This article explores how ISIS and the Taliban have fostered support through their parallel legal systems.

When a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart by strong tidal forces in a tidal disruption event (TDE).

Artificial photosynthesis aims to produce fuels from solar energy using chemical processes. In semi-artificial photosynthesis, a hybrid approach is taken using both chemical and biotechnology approaches. We aim to develop hybrid systems between light-harvesting nanoparticles and redox-enzymes (oxidoreductases)…

Promotor: Ed F. Deprettere, Co-promotor: Todor P. Stefanov

During the early modern period, many medieval manuscripts were cut up into strips of parchment which were reused to reinforce the bindings of newly printed books. Until recently, these reused pieces of medieval manuscripts only came to light when the early modern book binding was damaged and/or subjected…

In this thesis unconventional tools based on fluidic interfaces were developed to study the surface and interfacial chemistry of graphene, to characterize the intrinsic properties of graphene, to disentangle the effects of substrate and of the environmental factors, and to improve handling protocols…

How do humans control their thoughts and actions, and what can high-field brain scanning reveal about the underlying processes?

In this article, Barrie Sander, Assistant Professor of International Law, adopts a narrative theoretical lens to examine how security is constructed, contested, and narrated within three EU regulatory frameworks at the intersection of climate and AI governance - the Critical Raw Materials Act, the AI…

On the 19th of February, Mariana Martins successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Mariana on this achievement!

What mismatch of socioeconomic and environmental values is preventing Circular Collaboration in Dutch housing renovations?

Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, and Hadassah Drukarch, explored the role of intersectionality within (rehabilitation) robot design, testbed, and standards. Being oblivious to these considerations may give way to the development of robots that fall short of…

Democracy may lead to more deforestation in the tropics. So write environmental scientist Joeri Morpurgo and his colleagues in the prominent scientific journal Biological conservation. They found that competitive elections are associated with more loss of tropical rainforest than elections without competition.…

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…

Leiden University is publishing a list giving an overview of its research collaborations with the fossil fuel industry.