On Monday the 8th of December, the annual symposium of the IBL will be organized at the main building of the LUMC Leiden. This year’s theme is “Integrative Biology towards Healthy Communities”.

An external visitation committee gave the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) an outstanding assessment. In terms of research quality and relevance to society, the IBL gets the highest score: excellent. The increase with five new female professors also receives praise from the committee.

Gijs van der Velden has one of the best study results in his first college year of all science studies. With that, he won the Young Talent Incentive award and received 500 euros of the Koninklijke Hollandse Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW). The biology student remains quite nonchalantly. ‘Of course,…

In January, Dr Karsten Lambers was appointed as Professor of Digital and Computational Archaeology at Leiden University's Faculty of Archaeology. With his extensive background in both archaeological research and computational sciences, the installation of Professor Lambers further strengthens this discipline…

Algorithms solve problems. But which algorithm is best suited to which problem? During his doctoral research, Diederick Vermetten developed methods to figure this out. And that is important for the entire field.

This thesis deals with the use of sound in interactions in the context of participatory systems and data sonification. We investigate an interactive environment where participants perceive information of the data through sound elements.

What are the characteristics of impactful education for student application of inclusive design principles in design and technology programs?

Develop a prototype combined chemical-microbial enzymatical process for the sustainable, green recycling and revalorization of polyamides and polystyrene

The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science congratulates alumnus Pepijn van Heiningen and the with the Technische Hochschule Köln shared PhD-student Samineh Bagheri. At the SSCI 2016 conference on computational intelligence in Athens last week, both of them won an award for the high quality of…

Can furan-based resisn be degraded by microbial enzymes in combination with mild pre-treatment?

Striga hermonthica, commonly known as witchweed, infests major cereal crops in Sub-Saharan Africa causing severe yield losses and threatening the livelihood of millions of resource poor farmers.

Biologists today have to be able to work with big data. Data analysis skills should be taught from the start of the degree programme, or - even better - in secondary school. This is the message of Vera van Noort, new Professor of Computational Biology. Inaugural lecture 22 January.

Whether a microbe is beneficial or harmful to a plant can now be predicted with high accuracy thanks to bacLIFE. This bioinformatic tool with an intuitive interface makes it much easier to unlock the secrets of bacterial genomes. A group of Leiden biologists presented it in Nature Communications.

Biology student Britt van Kasterop has received a Holland Society Young Talent Award for her excellent results in the first year of study. The online awards ceremony took place on 30 November.

The most commonly used method for the taxonomic identification of tree trunks is wood anatomy. The number of experts in this area is decreasing, and education to become an wood anatomists takes many years. With the help of technology computer scientists of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science…

For decades, linguists have racked their brains over the question of precisely how the syntax of various languages is different. PhD candidate Martin Kroon has developed a computer system that brings us closer to finding an answer. His PhD defence is on 10 November.

Prof. Jaap van den Herik was a guest in the latest episode of the Nationale Data Podcast.

Historical linguist Lauren Fonteyn is awarded a substantial Digital Infrastructure grant as well as being selected as member of the prestigious Young Academy Leiden (YAL).

As of 1 July, Professor of Mathematical Biology Roeland Merks has got a full appointment at Leiden University. Before this expansion, he worked one day a week at the Mathematical Institute (MI). Merks will work half of his full appointment at the MI and the other half at the Institute of Biology Leiden…

Promotor: J.N. Kok, Co-promotor: H.J. Hoogeboom

Lecture, CHiLL series

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

PhD defence

On November 8, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) named Wessel Kraaij as one of the 2017 Distinguished Members. ACM Distinguished Members have made a significant contribution to the field of computing, computer science or information technology. This year, worldwide 43 scientists received…

On Thursday the 24th of November, Tseard Hoekstra and Jeroen Ververs (members of the delegation Holland Rijnland), Geert de Snoo (Dean Faculty of Science), Martina Vijver (CML), Herman Spaink (Scientific Director IBL) and Klaas Vrieling (IBL) explored possibilities for collaborations between companies…

150 new Biology students have arrived in Leiden. This is more than ever and we seem to settle among the big three Universities for Biology in the Netherlands.

On February 24, 2017, the Institute of Biology Leiden organised the first edition of the Biology Career Event. The career event for third year bachelor and master students was well received by the attendants. ‘I felt that the presenters and people doing the workshops were really trying to help us get…

The European Union has invested ten million euros in the so-called iNEXT-Discovery consortium. The goal of this new consortium is to enable European researchers to extend innovative structural biology research. The Netherlands Centre for Electron Nanoscopy (NeCEN) is also part of iNEXT-Disovery, which…

At the annual World Computer Chess Championship, chess computers from all over the world compete with each other. This year, Leiden University hosted the event.

With defending his thesis ‘Applications of topology to Weyl semimetals and quantum computing’, the Leiden theoretical physicist Tom O'Brien has gained the rare 'cum laude' qualification. The freshly minted PhD has started a five year research programme on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry, funded…

Programming courses are often only available in English. All the more reason for the Programming Education Research Lab (PERL) of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Eindhoven University of Technology and University of Twente to translate the 'Beauty and Joy of Computing' programming…

In a survey held last year by the publication Elsevier, Leiden's Computer Science programme was voted by students as the best university programme of its kind in the Netherlands. And the Rotterdam Economics programme was voted the best in its field. Leiden University now offers a combined study based…

Thomas Bakkum en Tom van der Wel, two PhD candidates from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, have both won poster prizes at the EMBL Chemical Biology Conference 2018 in Heidelberg.

Data and information should be stored in a way that computers can understand, says Barend Mons, professor of Biosemantics at the Leiden University Medical Center and Chair of the High Level Expert Group for the European Open Science Cloud. We speak with him about FAIR data, knowlets and nanopublicat…