Organisation

The doors of the new University Sports Centre are open to all students, staff and sports lovers. Want to see what it looks like? Watch the video and run through the centre with Zakari!

LACDR is committed to preparing its PhD candidates and postdocs for their future in the best possible way. One of the activities for this is the annual PhD-Postdoc event focused on career prospects. This year’s event was held on March 4th, 2025.

De Universiteit Leiden vindt de aanpassing van het bindend studieadvies geen verstandig plan.

Alexander van Oudenhoven has been appointed as the new Director of Education of the Governance of Sustainability master's programme. Van Oudenhoven has been appointed for a four-year period, from 1 October 2022 to 1 October 2026. The programme is taught in The Hague.

The PERSPECTIVE project looks to address the concept of successfulness. What does it mean to be the ‘perfect student’, to be 'successful' at university and later in life. It explores perfectionism, setting expectations, performance pressure and more.

Roeland Merks is the new director of the Lorentz Center as of 1 September. He has been appointed for a period of five years. In addition, Merks will remain associated with the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) and the Mathematical Institute (MI) as a professor. Merks succeeds Arjen Doelman, who has…

Organisation

Finance

Due to the great influx of PhD candidates, we had the pleasure to organize a 2nd PhD Introductory Course on Drug research this year. From November 4- 6, we welcomed 30 participants for this 3-days event, which took place at Castle Oud Poelgeest.

It was great to welcome so many colleagues at the LACDR Spring Symposium! After an inspiring lecture by Dr. Avinash Patel from Dewpoint Therapeutics, nine PhD speakers from LACDR, LIC, CHDR and LUMC-KFT gave presentations on a wide range of pharma-related topics. These speakers competed for first place.…

Organisation

Organisation

An impact factor of 3.2 in the Web of Science journal index. And in the first 10% of Elsevier's Scopus index. The International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (IJMIR), founded at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), has become one of the most important multimedia j…

On September 15th a new series of lectures will start, the Joint Lectures on Evolutionary Algorithms (JoLEA). This series of events is aimed at disseminating the latest, top-quality research on EAs. The lectures will feature world-renowned speakers, local researchers, and PhD students.

From Monday 19 July onwards, eighteen children between the ages of 10 and 12 are learning the programming language Hedy. In the Snellius building of Leiden University they will be taught the first principles of programming this week.

Organisation

Research

A project to improve practicals in science courses has been awarded a 175,000 subsidy. Leiden physicist Paul Logman is one of the applicants, together with colleagues from the UvA and Eindhoven University of Technology.

An international team of scientists, including Xander Tielens of Leiden Observatory, has used space telescope Hubble and the ALMA observatory to show that UV radiation from massive stars can prevent planets from forming. The researchers publish their findings on 1 March in the journal Science.

The Lorentz Center is 25 years old. A good reason for them to contribute to a series of TEDx lectures for Leiden City of Science. Arjen Doelman, director of the Lorentz Center, was the first to enter the virtual stage.

Education, Library, Research

Sebastian Pomplun from the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research has recently received an ERC Proof of Concept grant for his ambitious MYSTIC project. This initiative is set to transform cancer treatment by advancing the development of HeloMYC, a pioneering therapeutic candidate designed to target…

Marcello Bonsangue will be the new Scientific Director of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from January 2024. Bonsangue has been appointed for four years. He succeeds Aske Plaat, who led the institute for eight years.

Ornately decorated head pieces and jewellery, images of imposing mosques and photos of local people. The 'Splendours of the Silk Roads' exhibition depicts life and different cultures along this important trade route.

Finance

How anonymous is an individual in a social network? And is it possible for hackers to extract sensitive information from data? These were the main topics of the hackathon organized by POPNET and the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) on May 3 at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science.

Nanotechnology has pervaded numerous industrial sectors over the past decades. Although many of us may not be aware of it, nanomaterials are now embedded within many of the the products we use in our daily lives. The agricultural sector might be next in line. Leiden environmental scientists Tom Nederstigt…

Education, Finance, Research

Willem Jespers started his position as Assistant Professor in the group of Prof. G.J.P. van Westen on June 1st, a short introduction below:

Finance, Human resources

Facility

Koenraad Schalm will be the new programme director of the Physics master starting 1 November. He has been appointed for a period of four years. Schalm succeeds Ana Achúcarro who has held the position since 2021.

In 2021 a record number of researchers obtained a PhD at Leiden University. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the number of PhDs conferred was 448, one more than the previous record year of 2018.

Academics regularly face threats, intimidation and abuse. The Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) therefore launched the WetenschapVeilig platform on 7 November 2022.

Ben Wielstra and his team have received a ENW-M-1 grant. This grant of 354.000 euros is awarded by NWO, and will enable the researchers of the Institute of Biology Leiden and Naturalis to continue their evolutionary newt research.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has awarded a €1.6M contract to an LACDR-led consortium to assess how sensitivity to toxicity caused by chemicals varies among individual people. Currently these toxicodynamic differences are an unknown source of uncertainty when carrying out risk assessment…

Education, Research

Organisation

Dirk Uittenbogaard, a student on the Delft-Leiden Master’s in Industrial Ecology, has won a gold medal for rowing at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Uittenbogaard took gold in the men’s quadruple sculls, together with Abe Wiersma, Tone Wieten and Koen Metsemakers.

Did you watch the Dies Natalis on Tuesday the 8th? There, the new Strategic Plan of Leiden University was presented. The plan, Innovating and Connecting 2022-2027, is a plan by and for us all. It came about thanks to the involvement of many colleagues and students, from our Faculty as well.

This week, we had the LACDR PhD Introductory course on Drug. This is always a great opportunity for starting PhD candidates to get to know LACDR, CHDR, the Clinical Pharmacology department of LUMC and the embedding of the institute in the BioSciencepark as a whole.

Student Rozita Abdolrahimi Raeni is one of this year's winners of the KNMP Student Award. The Royal Dutch Society for the Advancement of Pharmacy (KNMP) hands out the award annually. Rozita is a master's student in Pharmacy and received the award for her excellent study results, motivation and commi…

Organisation, Research

Organisation

They are among the rarest and most extremely luminous stars in our universe: yellow hypergiants. Their spectacular eruptions have intrigued astronomers for decades, and now an international team led by Leiden’s emeritus professor Arnout van Genderen has gained new insights into the mechanisms behind…

Facility