Greenhouse gas emissions related to pharmaceutical consumption increased by 77 percent over the past 24 years, according to a Leiden University study published in The Lancet Planetary Health. Moreover, efficiency gains have stalled since 2008. ‘Our best option is reducing consumption and minimising…

Leiden University has received a €50,000 grant from Open Science NL to develop a roadmap for integrating open science into the strategic priorities of various institutes and translating this into human resource (HR) policies.

Scientists often need to make sense of complex systems without knowing the important parameters or even without access to all the information. A collaboration of network theorists, including Diego Garlaschelli (IMT Lucca/Leiden), has now published a review article in the inaugural issue of Nature Reviews…

Zsuzsa Bakk has been selected as the winner of the 2016 Distinguished Dissertation Award of the Classification Society for her thesis entitled 'Contributions to Bias Adjusted Stepwise Latent Class Modeling'.

How do plant defense genes get activated?

Studying how single DNA molecules behave helps us to better understand genetic disorders and design better drugs. Until now however, examining DNA molecules one-by-one was a slow process. Biophysicists from Delft University of Technology and Leiden University developed a technique that speeds up screening…

Prof. dr. Iain Gardner (University of Sydney) will be a visiting scholar at Leiden University Centre for the study of Religion (LUCSoR) in September-November 2015

What clothing is best to buy if you want to consider the environment? That question isn't so easy to answer. You have to consider the entire life cycle of a garment: from production to the moment we dispose of it. In the segment 'What's better?' of the radio programme Living Planet, environmental scientist…

Athletes always strive for the top. How can data scientists assist them in improving their performance? During the seminar Data Science and Sports, the possibilities and challenges of collaboration between these two worlds were discussed.

Seminar

The research article ‘Anatomy of a notch. An in-depth experimental investigation and interpretation of combat traces on Bronze Age swords’ is one of the most downloaded articles on the Journal of Archaeological Science website. This journal is one of the best for impact factor in the field. The article,…

How can social scientists contribute to a healthier society? That question was central to the Healthy Society Event on 9 June 2022, which successfully marked the start of a more conscious and intensive collaboration between the five Institutes of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences on education…

University is often a period of sexual exploration and experimentation, generally to the satisfaction of all involved. But sometimes you want it and the other doesn’t. Or vice versa. Or you can’t really tell. This is what the Safe Space play at Theater Ins Blau was about on 11 October. And: can your…

In recent years, the Walad Djifir from Chad found themselves in a turbulent environment due to the unrest in Nigeria, Libya and the Central African Republic. How did they adapt? Inge Butter explored their situation in her PhD thesis. PhD defence will take place on 2 July.

The LIACS Media Lab has received a research grant from the worldwide leading graphics hardware company NVIDIA. The grant exists of newly developed hardware utilizing thousands of processors. LIACS researchers will use it to investigate deep learning in understanding imagery from sources such as MRI…

Uniting an international consortium of scholars, the Skandapurāṇa Project comprises a team of researchers working in fields across the Humanities. We are creating a critical edition of a foundational work of purāṇic literature and, in doing so, tracing the dynamics of a textual tradition to better understand…

Lecture, This Time for Africa! series

Every student learns about science, but those of the Master Honours Class ‘The Academic Life’ went an extra mile. They learned all the ins-and-outs of academia and rounded off this successful lecture series with a final session on evaluating scientific research.

On January 28 and 29, 2021 the conference ‘Imperial Artefacts: History, Law and the Looting of Cultural Property’ took place online. This first of its kind event at Leiden University was an interdisciplinary online conference and brought together (post-)colonial historians, legal historians, curators,…

A full overview of all loans and debts between banks would help preventing a new financial collapse. But banks do not provide this information. An econophysics model by Diego Garlaschelli and collaborators reconstructs the most probable situation and finishes first place in two independent tests.

Last week, the EARLI SIG 24 Workshop 2024 took place from 25 to 27 September at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. 25 researchers from 10 different countries came together to work on fostering researcher independence.

Leiden University celebrated the annual prize ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC) on 8 November with lectures by leading scientists in a festively decorated Pieterskerk.

This year, Leiden University is organising the 34th Award Ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC). Who will be the prize winners this year?

Mirjam de Bruijn's VICI project Connecting in Times of Duress held its final conference in N'Djamena, Chad, from 23 to 29 October.

Human Rights organisation Amnesty International recently set up a walk that passes by important locations in Leiden in relation to human rights. The Kamerlingh Onnes Building, home to Leiden Law School, has been included in the route.

After a semester of brainstorming, writing, rewriting and editing, the time has come: the fifth edition of Leiden Elective Academic Periodical (LEAP) has been launched!

Astronomers want to understand the Universe, from the Big Bang to the present day, and what the future will hold. In Leiden they focus on two key questions: ‘How did stars and planets originate’ and ‘How were galaxies and black holes formed in the young Universe?’ A new generation of telescopes – just…

In this first ever podcast from LUCIS, hosts Yasmin Ismail & Sara Bolghiran explore what it means to imagine Muslim futures. Over 6 episodes we explore questions around what it means to imagine, the politics of imagination and what it would mean to engage with Muslims from the perspective of futures…

Who can you contact for support and advice?

docARTES is a doctoral programme for performers and composers. It offers a unique environment for critical reflection on musical practice.

Starting with the ‘why’, putting herself in her students’ shoes and providing structure. These are three ways in which environmental scientist Ranran Wang tries to make her course as interesting and manageable as possible. With success: she has been nominated for Science Teacher of the Year 2022.

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ‘EU policy and implementation: making Europe work!’ of Public Administration is included in the list of Class Central of the best courses in 2020.

What happens in the brains of people with psychiatric illnesses? With a €23.23 million gravity grant, scientists from different fields will search for biological causes over the next decade. ‘By joining forces, we hope to improve diagnosis and treatment for patients with these diseases.’

The NWO has awarded Sara Polak a Rubicon grant. In September, she will start a 12-month period of research at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

Eco-innovations like more economical cars do not generate the environmental benefits predicted by the manufacturers. This is the result of the so-called rebound effect, concludes Leiden industrial ecologist David Font Vivanco on the basis of new algorithms. PhD defence 3 March.

Kidney failure is a serious issue because kidneys cannot regenerate themselves after injury. A possible solution consists of artificially growing healthy kidney tissue. To achieve that, scientists first need to understand kidney development during the earliest stages, in the fetus. Leiden researchers…

A new discovery proves that it matters which approach researchers take in analyzing large physical, social or biological systems that have a networked structure. Ever since the early 1900s, scientists have assumed each approach is equivalent. Now many results in statistical physics may no longer hold.…

Where do Humanities alumni work after they graduate? And how should they prepare to enter the labour market? According to three Humanities alumni and their employers, the answer is: ‘Find the biggest challenges the world has to offer – they hold all kinds of possibilities for ambitious people.’

Health psychologist Andrea Evers is one of the 19 new members, selected by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), who have been inaugurated on 16 September 2019. The Academy has now about 550 members.

Lecture