Marta Fiocco has been appointed as of 1 April as professor of applied mathematics, in particular medical statistics. Fiocco's appointment is at the Faculty of Science and at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC). She conducts research into 'personalised medicine', tailor-made medicines for cancer…

Missing legends, illogical connections or three-dimensional graphs. There are many ways in which data can deceive. Five students took up the fight against misleading statistics. Their lesson series can now be found online.

Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics Jacqueline Meulman received an honorary membership during the annual meeting of the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research (VVSOR). This makes her the eleventh honorary member of the society.

Research

Using mathematics to help children with bone cancer. It sounds a little strange, but for statistician Marta Fiocco, it's just her job. She gets a substantial grant from KiKa for it. With that money, she is going to study the effect of chemotherapy adjustments.

Using mathematics to determine whether scientific results are significant or not. Peter Grünwald, full professor of Statistical Learning at the Mathematical Institute (MI) and senior researcher in the Machine Learning group of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant…

Assistant Professor Lucie Zicha at Leiden University College (LUC) in The Hague is on a mission to bring statistical literacy to all undergraduate students.

Why use Google Maps when you can also calculate your bike route based on your own data. Statistician and cyclist Alexander Dürre sees statistics in everything around him. He analyses data of soccer games and calculates the possible winners of cycling races. ‘When I have too much time, I apply statistics…

As of 1 April 2025, Professor E.A.L.M.G (Elke) Moons has been appointed professor by special appointment of the chair ‘Crime Statistics’ at Leiden University’s Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden Law School.

Are you keen to beat your friends or colleagues and win the European Championship football pool? Statistician Marjolein Fokkema has some tips that might increase your chances.

'Frans Rodenburg is an excellent teacher who is able to convey difficult information,' say his students. In his statistics classes, he wants to make students enthusiastic for his beloved subject. 'Most students are convinced that statistics is not for them. I am here to convince them otherwise.' Rodenburg…

Social

Mathilde Verdam and Julian Karch (Methodology and Statistics) have been awarded a grant as co-applicants by Openscience NL to promote "Open software for statistically responsible research".

People can be easily mislead with graphs. But they don’t necessarily stay misled, the research shows.

How can we hack prejudice about age and ageing out of the recruitment process? That was the question data scientists, psychologists and HR professionals tackled during the AnyAge.AI hackathon. 'AI can actually be used to increase fairness in recruitment.

Wouter Weeda has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute of Psychology by the Board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. He will start on 1 December 2025 for a period of three years, succeeding Hanneke Hulst.

What exactly does it mean when your doctor says you have a ‘good chance’ of survival? Leiden researchers discovered that there is a big difference in how people interpret such probability phrases. And that can be a problem, warns lead researcher Sanne Willems in her blog post.

Research

Graduation Ceremony

Lecture

Five lecturers from Leiden University have received a Comenius teaching award. With the grants they can carry out an innovation project.

A new university-wide survey is now open to all involved in conducting, teaching, advising on, or supporting research related activities at Leiden University, aiming to better understand the current state of Open Science awareness and practice. Initiated by Archaeology’s then PhD candidate, now guest…

If doctors could better estimate a patient's chances of survival, this would help in choosing a specific treatment. It would be particularly beneficial for the rare and malignant Ewing sarcoma, which mainly affects children and adolescents. Mathematics professor Marta Fiocco has been awarded a substantial…

Simay Çetin won the FSW Master’s Thesis Prize 2021 with her thesis “Interpreting Culture through Embodied Practice: An anthropological study of sexuality among Dutch Women with Turkish Migrant backgrounds”. She was supervised by Prof. dr. Peter Pels. According to the jury is Simay’s thesis not only…

SOLO (Dutch: Support voor Onderzoek, Laboratoria en Onderwijs) supports FSW faculty members who need help with the use of ICT and equipment in research or education.

The PhD track involves many different aspects. As well as important administrative steps that you have to take, for example, there are also introductory activities, a training programme and opportunities for research abroad.

PhD defence

PhD defence

Integration of research and teaching is one of the ambitions of our vision on teaching and learning (Learning@LeidenUniversity).

In 2022-2023 eight (teams of) teachers received a Grassroots or Grass shoots grant. Here you can read about their projects.

When structured properly, the data are easier to manipulate, analyze and visualize.

Qualtrics survey software allows you to create online questionnaires for your research. It provides various question types, branch logic and the possibility to export results to statistical software, such as SPSS.