Charlotte Parree won the Jaap Doek Children's Rights Thesis Prize on Tuesday afternoon, 6 December, with her thesis entitled 'Suffering knows no age; active termination of life does.' The prize was awarded for the tenth time by em. prof. Jaap Doek.

Many humanities graduates find work in digital heritage, but a good pedagogical model to match education is lacking. University lecturers Karin de Wild and Peter Verhaar want to change this with a Comenius grant.

Doctoral Grant for lecturer to research witness protection at the international courts.

The European Commission awarded the project proposal INSIGHT, a follow-up project on illegal firearms trafficking and gun violence from Professor Social Resilience and Security Marieke Liem and PhD-researcher Katharina Krüsselmann of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA).

We are pleased to announce that Lidwien will continue to fulfil the role of Student Assessor within the Faculty of Archaeology's Board next academic year. Since her start in September last year, building on her previous experience in the Education Committee, she has continued to develop into a connecting…

Professor Johan Rooryck, currently executive director of cOAlition S, will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Tromsø for his commitment to open access in science. He will be awarded the honorary doctorate on 1 September.

Organisation, Security

In a recent study, Dr. Moji Aghajani and colleagues show that adolescents with a severe form of Conduct Disorder (CD) -with limited prosocial emotions- require an unusually large amount of brain capacity to read emotional faces. These effects were found in comparison to CD youth without limited prosocial…

Electrical inner ear prostheses like Cochlear Implants (CIs) help deaf and severely hearing-impaired persons to regain many of their communication abilities. The performance of CI in social environments is, however, not optimal. The new "Machine learning To Enhance teMPoral cOding foR cochleAr impLants“…

Eva Michaels talks about the current international security environment, including intelligence issues with Sir John Sawers in an interview in El País.

How do classroom demonstration experiments help students learn chemical reasoning? Marie-Jetta den Otter, PhD student at ICLON, researched this. She defends her thesis on 6 December.

Yesterday, an article appeared in Biznews about the watershortages in California. David Zetland, university lecturer at Leiden University College, gives his opinion about this problem.

Research

Professor Claartje Levelt, together with Paula Fikkert (Radboud University), has received an NWO Open Competition grant for research into the development of word production in toddlers.

Education, Organisation

‘The Oscars of the natural sciences’, is what they are called: the Breakthrough Prizes awarded annually in America by the Breakthrough Foundation. Part of this are the New Horizons prizes for early-stage researchers. Sebastiaan Haffert, researcher at the Observatory, is this year's winner.

In a confidential meeting, the University Council (UR) and the Executive Board (CvB) have discussed security within our buildings, partly as a result of media reports on this topic that appeared during the summer. The University Council has shared concerns expressed by staff and students concerning…

Research

Our Keyholders are a close network of over 500 committed donors who actively support Leiden University. Pauline Höhner-Regout, who started working at the LUF since April, talks about her role as a Keyholder fundraiser.

A research team from Leiden University, in cooperation with Bureau Boekhoorn Sociaal-Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek en Advies (BBSO), is to evaluate Dutch counterterrorism legislation.

A KIEM grant was recently awarded to a diverse group of Leiden researchers, aiming to organise an interdisciplinary conference with the title ‘Ancient Religions and the Materiality of Danger’ in 2026. The topic of the conference marks a shift towards the study of the role of objects.

Evaluations of a most challenging year to both staff and students in terms of teaching and education support have turned out remarkably well. Although we had to switch to online education almost overnight, we pulled it off!

Education, ICT

On 21 April 2022, Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski visited Leiden. The theme of his visit was the role of law and historiography in shaping collective memories.

Education

To check whether the classroom scanners are secure, a ‘pen test’ was performed in the Lipsius building on Monday 28 March. This involved switching on the person counters for a day so that ethical hackers could try to gain access to the system.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has granted four grants to Leiden humanities scholars. They get to spend this money on research on a topic of their choice, without thematic preconditions.

Work has begun on an accommodation complex for international PhD candidates and postdocs at the Leiden Bio Science Park.

In Berlin, regulations have recently been amended to allow everyone to swim topless. In swimming pools in Amsterdam, women are still required to wear a top piece. Dutch newspaper Het Parool investigates whether Amsterdam swimmers also have the right to dive into the pool without wearing a top.

Nerve pain is one of the most common side effects of chemotherapy. It is therefore one of the biggest reasons for cancer patients to stop treatment early. Darcy Reynolds worked on new drug candidates against this pain during her bachelor's thesis. She developed a new series of molecules that increase…

Last weekend, all university buildings were closed and the university systems were unavailable. The reason for this was the major maintenance of the university network. The network’s core needed to be shut down for this, including all supplies and services. A large group of staff from ISSC as well as…

These are turbulent times at Dutch universities. We have all seen what has been and is still happening at various campuses in the country. Protests, demonstrations, occupations. Situations and scenes that deeply affect us all.

The Academic Language Centre is organising an introduction to Ukrainian with the Russian Studies/Russian and Eurasian Studies programmes. This six-part course is meant primarily for people who are in contact with refugees from Ukraine.

The Rein Dool painting depicting board members of Leiden University will be moving soon to the Reception Room in the Academy Building, where more people will be able to see it.

The government spends millions regulating companies that work with large quantities of hazardous substances. But we don’t know whether this is making the industry safer. The number of violations and incidents remains constant. This is the conclusion of external PhD candidate Rob in ’t Veld in his dissertation.…

Abuse of power, sexually transgressive behaviour and non-funny jokes: they all came up in the stage show Mindlab, which was performed at the end of September to get staff of the Faculty of Humanities to talk about undesirable and transgressive behaviour.

Psychologist Floor van Meer won the first Trial & Error Award for her research on the effect of being distracted while eating on eating behavior. This award from the Journal of Trial & Error (JOTE) honors the often underappreciated aspect of research: learning from errors. For her publication, Van Meer…

The Schoof cabinet has presented its budget. As expected, higher education is facing severe cuts. In the coming period, the Executive Board will regularly look at the consequences of what it deems an irresponsible policy.

The Faculty of Humanities’ On-Campus Master’s Experience Day was a pleasantly busy event. The information sessions and corresponding information market went down well with interested undergraduates.

A course that concludes with a video pitch, instead of a paper or examination: Italian Language and Culture students each recorded their own knowledge clip, speaking to a wide audience about Italian cultural expressions. We asked Goran Bouaziz, Cameron-May Bosch and Katja Timmer what they thought of…

How do you get fit after these challenging times? How do you actively start a healthy lifestyle? Healthy University Leiden would like to address these topics during the upcoming from #COVID to #GOFIT Week, which will take place from 21 to 25 June 2021.

Leiden psychologists Janine Westendorp and Liesbeth van Vliet have investigated types of communication that seriously ill patients may experience as harmful. The results of this research were published in the American journal Cancer. And the results have now also been published as a poster for education…

Organisation

Despite considerable progress in the design of multifunctionalized nanoparticles (NPs) that selectively target specific cell types, their systemic application often results in unwanted liver accumulation. The exact mechanisms for this general observation are still unclear.

That one handy little tool to do a quiz with students: can you use that or will you inadvertently put their privacy at risk? New privacy guidelines offers a solution.

In 2021, Assistant Professor Tax Law Rens Pieterse published a biography about former professor in tax law H.J. Hofstra. Dutch magazine ‘Het Register’ did an extensive spread on Pieterse, his writing and other activities.

Mums posting photos and videos of their child on Instagram and TikTok and also earning loads of money doing so. Kidfluencers, momvloggers and familyvlogs are very popular, in the Netherlands too. But the lack of legislation regulating these activities means that these children are barely protected.…

It’ll be a sight to behold: 54 begowned beadles striding through the streets of Leiden. The beadles from 14 universities will gather in Leiden on 25 and 26 August for the 30th National Beadle Day.

During the HALON hacking competition, 28 teams had one goal: to find as many vulnerabilities as possible in the systems of Dutch higher education institutions. Research software engineer Chris Handy participated on his own and ended up in second place in the category ‘Vulnerabilities found at the highest…

During a well-attended Studium Generale lecture at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Professor Ellen de Bruijn demonstrated how hormonal fluctuations influence the female brain. 'We urgently need more attention for the mental health of girls and women during transitional periods.'