Anyone who has taken a walk through the centre of Leiden before might have come across him, an attentive group of tourists gathered around. After studying history, Koen van Toen, or Koen Marijt, started his own business. He now organises historical walks, among other things.

Commercial MRI systems cost millions of euros to purchase and require highly trained technicians to operate. Prof. Andrew Webb works on accessible MRI techniques that offer new opportunities in both developed and developing countries. Webb is a professor at the Radiology Department of the LUMC and,…

I'm a university lecturer at Leiden University. My main research project is to develop a new concept of 'relativity' and defend its application to a range of phenomena, such as the nature of time and consciousness. I also have an active interest in the philosophy of perception, part-whole structures,…

University lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe of Leiden University reflects in Global News Canada on the global implications of Donald Trump's foreign policy.

As a student, Ratna Lachmansingh wrote her thesis on horror films. Now she is the director of Leiden International Film Festival.

Costume dramas would have us believe that women in the Middle Ages became mothers at a much younger age than they do today. University lecturer Krista Milne wants to refute this image with the help of an NWO XS grant. ‘In the past, not all data was taken into account.’

The United Nations fall short in their recently published guide to address hunger without surpassing the 1.5-degree climate threshold. This initial version is a significant step, according to a group of researchers including those of Leiden University. However, they miss an essential topic: reducing…

One of our most engaged and expert scholars is bidding farewell. After forty years at Leiden Law School, first as a student and later as a professor, Niels Blokker reflects on his university career.

As an academic, it’s not easy to communicate your research to society – and in a language people will understand. With its Outreach Grant Symposium, Young Academy Leiden (YAL) wants to support and inspire a new generation of ‘outreachers’.

The fight against insurgents, guerrillas and resistance movements is an ‘incredibly unpopular’ topic with experts and military personnel, says Professor by Special Appointment of Military History Thijs Brocades Zaalberg in his inaugural lecture. He warns that ignoring these forms of irregular warfare…

Jordi Tura's research interests combine various aspects of quantum information science, from quantum computing to device-independent quantum information processing. He has worked on entanglement theory and Bell inequalities in multipartite systems and, over the course of the last few years, he has been…

I am currently a University Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy at Leiden University. My main research areas are philosophy of physics and philosophy of science. I am also interested in the metaphysics of quantities, Early Modern history and philosophy of science and philosophy of cognitive science.

Boyarsky is on a quest to unravel the nature of one of the most mysterious phenomena in the Universe. The cosmos appears to consist for the larger part out of mass we cannot see. We have no idea where it comes from. Physicists call this ‘dark matter’. Sterile neutrinos are candidate building blocks…

Alex Colling himself calls his bachelor's thesis ‘the highlight of his time in Leiden’. And according to his supervisors, that resulted in an outstanding thesis, with great attention to detail. The Mathematics and Physics student worked on a mathematical description of monopoles: hypothetical particles…

Predicting the collective behaviour of systems, like a large group of people electing one of the parties, is no easy task. But there’s a theory that scientists have been using for decades to do just that: the theory of Gibbs measures. Last week, mathematician Mirmukhsin Makhmudov earned his PhD for…

Jiska Ogier studied notarial law, which wasn’t always easy because she went to lectures in a wheelchair. As a student she pushed to make society accessible. And with her law degree and lived experience she has now made this her work. ‘You can achieve a lot with creative solutions.’

When you think of migration, you probably won’t immediately think of dating apps. Yet such apps are important to many migrants, such as those who identify as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer or questioning (LGBT+). Researcher Andrew DJ Shield studied the role that dating apps play in the migration process,…

After many years of preparations, CERN has approved a groundbreaking new experiment: the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP). Physicist Alexey Boyarsky was involved from the start. ‘We know there is physics that’s missing and we aim to find it.’

Swarms of drones, pedestrians or the cells in your body. Those are all examples of active matter: materials whose building blocks can move autonomously. That’s what Luca Giomi studies. Giomi has been appointed Professor of theoretical physics in the area of soft matter and biological physics at the…