Meindert H. Lamers is co-director of the Netherlands Center for Electron Nanoscopy (NeCEN) at the Faculty of Science and head of the section Light and Electron Microscopy at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). His research group at the LUMC studies molecular mechanisms of DNA replication and…

Leiden University, together with Utrecht University, the LUMC and 10 other Dutch universities and institutes, has been awarded a grant of more than €30 million in the NWO call Roadmap Large-scale Scientific Infrastructure (GWI).

PhD defence

Physicist Sense Jan van der Molen researches materials that do not exist in nature. ‘It’s fascinating to see how the properties of a material change if we manage to make it super thin.’ He will give his inaugural lecture on 21 October.

The principal aim of this research is to explore the confrontation between voice and electronics. This confrontation will fundamentally examine emergent relationships between voice and electronics, especially pertaining to constituting the voice’s identity in music, the use of extended vocal techniques,…

‘Microscopy is by far the least understood, most inefficiently operated, and the most abused of all laboratory instruments,’ reads the quote on the office wall of microscopy unit supporters Joost Willemse en Gerda Lamers. It describes exactly why the two developed the microscopy course for starting…

White clouds of ice-cold gas flowing across the floor. Magical, but be careful not to freeze your fingers off. We are of course talking about liquid nitrogen and helium. You may have seen the spectacular Freezing Physics science show by the student organisation Rino. But did you know that this commodity…

PhD defence

More CO2 in the atmosphere is making food crops more calorific, less nutritious and potentially more toxic.

Micro- and nanoplastics cause stress to crops such as lettuce and carrots, PhD candidate Laura Julia Zantis found. This can lead to reduced growth and a lower nutritional value. Biodegradable plastics have this effect too, likely because of chemicals they release during degradation.

Leiden researchers have found clues to why a rare pregnancy disorder is mild in some babies but life-threatening in others. Their discovery opens the door to a test that could identify severe cases during pregnancy. Fortunately, a treatment already exists.

PhD defence

Fewer CO2 emissions, less airborne viral transmission, and a more sustainable form of food production: seven consortia of researchers and societal partners will put a budget of 32 million euros towards developing technological innovations. Important Leiden research on circular electronics by Prof. Dr.…

Jörg Meyer investigates energy conversion at interfaces at the atomic scale. Starting from the Schrödinger equation, he develops and employs computer simulation techniques.

Moving an electron microscope of 2000 kg is a delicate challenge. The highly sensitive instrument needed to be moved to a new measurement hall, but even a tiny bump could damage it. After a few nerve-racking weeks of preparing the move and reinstalment, the researchers finally have a verdict: the instrument…

Lecture, Tuesday Talk

Huub de Groot aims to understand the fundamentals of direct energy conversion by proteins, complexes, membranes and cells in natural photosynthesis for the chemical design of responsive matrices for direct energy conversion with high yield by artificial photosynthesis.

Fons Verbeek has a background in Computer Science and Biology; he has a PhD in Applied Physics. His research topic is Image Analysis with a focus on microscopy imaging. His research stretches from feature extraction and segmentation to classification strategies in the domain of the life-sciences.

Biophysicist Alireza Mashaghi and his collaborators are taking up the fight against muscular dystrophy: genetic disorders that cause muscle weakness. They want to inhibit the clumping of proteins that results in toxic aggregates. For this, the team receives 550,000 euros from Health Holland. The team…

The goal of Geert-Jan Kroes is to achieve the ability to predict the outcome of dissociative chemisorption reactions of small molecules on transition metal surfaces. This requires an accurate modeling of the molecule-metal surface interaction and of the reaction dynamics, including energy dissipatio…

Researchers need to work in specialized environments when they work with dangerous bacteria and viruses. These microbes spread easily, so only in labs with a high biosafety levels they can be studied. Unfortunately, to look at the microbes properly, expensive microscopes are needed that are not always…

My research focuses on the action of the glucocorticoid receptor, which is an intracellular receptor that belongs to the family of steroid receptors.

Our research aims to understand the role of mycobacterial cell wall-deficiency in persistency and pathogenicity in Tuberculosis and to elucidate its molecular regulation for future drug targeting. For this we investigate and characterize cell wall-deficient strains from Mycobacterial species and establish…

PhD defence

To understand how the brain works, it is essential to map it out in detail. This appears to be possible with a microscopy technique in which Leiden physicists excel. This breakthrough could significantly advance the human quest to understand brain functions.

A microscope with incredible sharpness that leaves samples unharmed – Guido Stam helped develop one. During his PhD research, he combined light and electrons to study biological samples. ‘We can now measure things that simply weren’t possible before.’

About forty microscopes, various laboratories, and some 15,000 zebrafish: that’s Sylvia le Dévédec's workplace. She is one of the managers of the Leiden Cell Observatory, a unique facility accessible to all researchers.

‘Working in Leiden is a dream come true.’ Ákos Kovács studied in his birth country Hungary and worked in Germany, Denmark and Groningen. As professor of Microbiome Ecology at IBL, he immediately started working together with his new colleagues to make discoveries about the versatile bacterial species…

The guardian of our genome, the protein MutS, scans the DNA for spelling errors and makes sure they are corrected. An essential process for our health. Researchers at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) have discovered precisely how this protein works by making MutS visible with cryo-electron microscopy.…

150 years of the Fine Mechanical and Electronics Department—a milestone our instrument makers and electronics engineers can truly be proud of. For a century and a half, they have crafted unique research instruments for the Faculty of Science, making an indispensable contribution to its experimental…

PhD defence

Physicist Milan Allan will build an instrument that will bring superconductivity research further. He has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of 2 million euros over the next five years. With his PairNoise programme he aims to detect paired electrons as they occur just above the temperature at which…