An independent panel recently conducted an Institutional Audit (ITK) of Leiden University. It assessed whether our quality assurance and quality culture are organised in such a way as to realise our educational vision and goals. Its initial conclusions? Leiden University easily meets all the standards…

PhD candidate Maia Casna received an Incentive Prize from the Dutch Association for Physical Anthropology (NVFA). She was rewarded this honor for her innovative research into respiratory diseases and her talent for presenting her results to both academic and general audiences. ‘It feels really nice…

Dr Antonio Missiroli has been appointed as Associate Senior Policy Fellow for Emerging Security Threats at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA).

The demonstration on November 14th in Utrecht was cancelled, but alternative protests took place in Leiden and The Hague. Read the message from our Dean why we should keep raising our voices against the proposed budget cuts.

In December 2020, the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs and Helmut Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg signed a cooperation agreement to cooperate in the education realm on a variety of topics related to the Civilian and Military dimensions of European and Global Security…

Tradition has it that at the end of each academic year, the best master’s thesis in Political Science is awarded a prize. For 2021-2022, the jury is considering six nominations. All of great quality, but on different topics. These range from political party bans to questions regarding commitment within…

From 22 to 24 October, researchers of the MARBLES-project informed museum visitors about microbes: bacteria and fungi that live all around us. The event was organised around the Micro-day of Leiden, which is this year’s EU City of Science.

Around 200 scholars from around the world are expected in Leiden to discuss the contribution of courts to societal change. Leiden Law School is hosting the conference.

Find the answers to all your teaching questions on the Science Teacher Platform by SEEDS.

Koos Biesmeijer, Professor of Natural Capital, and Claire van Megen, an Educational and Child Studies student, are in with a chance of winning Leiden’s Person of the Year title.

Recently, Bram Slütter, Amanda Foks and Ilze Bot all individually obtained an ERA4Health research grant from the CARDINNOV 2023 program. In this program, which is co-funded by the EU and in the Netherlands by ZonMW, 17 consortia consisting of 3-5 European academic partners were selected for funding…

Education, Research

Prof. Suzan Stoter will be the Dean of Leiden Law School at Leiden University as of 1 January 2024. The Leiden University Executive Board has appointed her for a period of four years. Stoter succeeds Joanne van der Leun, who, together with the other members of the Faculty Board, brought great verve…

Suzanne van der Pluijm will be appointed Executive Director and Member of the Board of the Faculty of Science with effect from 1 June 2022. She succeeds Ed van den Berg, who has held this position on an interim basis since 1 September 2021 .

One of the EU's most heralded weapons against tax avoidance and evasion falls prey to political whims, is applied arbitrarily, and lacks transparency, according to tax observers and lawmakers.

Katharina Natter of the Institute of Political Science has been awarded the 2025 IMR Book Review Award for her book on migration politics in Morocco and Tunisia.

Toen in 2019 honderden afvalcontainers in de Waddenzee vielen, wilde de overheid geen informatie vrijgeven over wat er in de containers zat. Vijf jaar later weten we eindelijk meer, nadat hoogleraar Esther Kentin beroep deed op de Wet Open Overheid.

What is the state of open science at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs? Our faculty offers a unique environment for moving open science practices forward, while keeping a critical eye to their potential excesses.

Facility

Education, Research

At the division of BioTherapeutics, Amanda Foks, Bram Slütter and Ilze Bot have obtained a €4 million research grant from the HORIZON 2022 EIC Pathfinder Challenge “Cardiogenomics”, entitled “B-specific: B-cell related gene and protein markers with prognostic and therapeutic value for CVD”.

Willem Jespers was awarded the international prize, worth €10,000, for pharmacy and pharmacology from the Rottendorf foundation on October 13th 2023 at the University of Münster. He was recognized for his research in the field of computer-aided drug development and the prediction of drug toxicities.…

The faculty introduction morning was held on Tuesday 31 August as part of the University’s OWL activities. Our new international exchange, master’s and advanced master’s students from more than 50 countries were welcomed to the faculty.

Facility

The Leiden University Fund (LUF) invites researchers of all faculties to submit applications for the Leiden Empowerment Fund (LEF).

Facility

Russian writer and cardiologist Maxim Osipov will come to the Netherlands for a year to teach in Leiden about Russian literature, his own work and the political situation in Russian.

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) has started vaccinating staff from its intensive care, emergency and COVID departments. Junior doctor Christianne van Lieshout received the first jab on 6 January.

Last Thursday, 1 June, the Institute of Psychology's strategy was officially presented during the Institute of Psychology Party. After a year of commitment from across the organisation, there is now a plan for the next five years that includes five focal points, based on the Leiden academic core val…

From September 2024, Berber Verhalle is the new assessor of the Faculty of Science. She thus takes over from Nalani Verwoord. Berber completed her bachelor's degree in Biology this year. Next year, she will start the master's in Biology & Business.

Three directors of PostNL have been arrested in Belgium, suspected of human trafficking among other things. Abuses also exist in the Dutch parcel delivery sector. Why does the Netherlands act less firmly?

Spui Campus is almost ready to open its doors. In the place where the iconic V&D department store started trading back in 1928, thousands of students will soon be attending lectures. The building has undergone an extensive renovation that is sensitive to its history.

Rafał Matuszewski and Kim Beerden, both university lecturers in Ancient History, received a grant from The A.G. Leventis Foundation.

The magazine 'De kracht van (on)macht' was published in January 2025 as part of the NWA research project 'Crafting Resilience'. It marks the start of a series of seven publications. This edition focuses safety and security for vulnerable groups in society.

During the 6th edition of the Graz Expert Meeting on Single-cell sequencing technologies in the cardiovascular field, held on September 15 and 16 in Graz, Austria, Jill de Mol from the group of Dr. Amanda Foks from the Division of BioTherapeutics received the award for best poster presentation.

ICT

Social

Radhika Gupta has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council to study how transnational Islamic charitable networks are entangled with Western humanitarianism and neoliberal welfare frameworks.

On April 14, 2025, Dr. Hans Petschar, the recently-retired Director of the Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, delivered the Sixth Annual Austrian Studies Lecture 'Austria’s Present Past: A visual journey through Austrian history 1925 – 2025'.

Are magnetic fields older than the first light? And how did they influence the development of our universe right after the Big Bang? Cosmologists from Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht are now collaborating to investigate this.

On Monday 27 October, Jasper goes on safari in the Van Steenis building. And will he manage to stay dry more often than he gets soaked cycling between meetings? You’ll find out – along with the rest of Jasper’s day – in this column.

Customisation is high on the political agenda, but how do you make it work? Many public organisations are struggling to find an answer to this question. Which steps are essential to effectively implement made-to-measure solutions within an organisation. The Leiden Leadership Centre (LLC) is organising…

How do you know if your idea has succeeded? The Queen coming to call a year and a half later might just be a clue. This happened to the Leiden student foundation ‘Door Het Geluid’, which promotes student well-being.

How can we view societal challenges from a different perspective? At the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), Robert Zwijnenberg, Emeritus Professor of Art and Science Interactions, will call for more collaboration between artists and scientists.

How does loneliness work? What sometimes makes friendships complicated for autistic people? And why can the school building be such an unpleasant place for some pupils? Pupils explored this during their pre-university classes. 'I now have a good idea of what studying psychology entails.'

More than a course. That was the aim of the Leiden Tutoring programme. Through weekly tutoring lessons, students did not just earn five EC. They helped Dutch primary-school children from neighbourhoods with a low socioeconomic status.

In the Netherlands, when we talk about the United Nations, the conversation is almost always about the member states from the northern hemisphere. But the most interesting players come from the ‘Global South’, Professor Alanna O'Malley and her team argue in a podcast.

Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor of Law & Technology at eLaw, was interviewed by EUobserver and Al Jazeera English on the European Commission’s newly unveiled Digital Omnibus package – a set of proposals that would amend the GDPR, the AI Act, cookie rules and parts of the EU’s cybersecurity…