Why do we need fundamental science? For a lot of reasons, speakers showed at the Lustrum Symposium ‘Science Matters’. This symposium was held on 18 March 2016 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Faculty of Science.

Crucial information about research, funding or how university rankings are created is often not freely accessible. The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information calls for such information to be made open. Professor Ludo Waltman is one of its initiators. What needs to change?

Annually, the Dutch Palynologische Kring invites nominations for the Florschütz Award for best MSc thesis in Palynology and Palaeobotany. This year, the thesis of Archaeology alumna Oda Nuij was deemed to be the best one. Oda was surprised to hear she won, since she was not sure that the thesis would…

Paco Barona Gomez is the newest associate professor at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL). The Mexican researcher is fascinated by the evolution of natural products: compounds made by microbes, but also plants and animals. ‘It’s like we investigate chemical dark matter.’

Carlotta Rigotti and Eduard Fosch-Villaronga launch a call for workshop papers on fairness and AI in the labour market at the 16th JSAI International Symposia on AI as part of the Horizon Europe BIAS project.

The first larger quantum computers will soon be available. These computers need new software. Researchers at Leiden University have been awarded a Gravitation grant to develop the necessary software. They will be collaborating with colleagues from other research institutions.

Cleaners who have just ninety seconds to clean each toilet. Bus drivers who have too few comfort breaks. Food deliverers who are apped by an algorithm if they cycle too slowly: 'Can't you find it?' How do people keep going in today's demanding, dynamic work environment? This is the core question in…

Danny Mekić was presented with the Felipe Rodriquez Award by Bits of Freedom on 13 February. The PhD student won the award for successfully suing X after the social media platform had ‘shadow banned’ him.

The Centre for Digital Scholarship of Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities would like to invite you to the symposium on Tools Criticism on Thursday 21 November, from 10.00-18.00. The symposium will be held in the Vossius room of the University Library at Witte…

In a world first, an international team of researchers has read an unopened letter from Renaissance Europe – without breaking its seal or damaging it in any way. Nadine Akkerman, Reader in early modern English literature at Leiden University, is co-author of the article that appeared on 2 March in Nature…

The internet is a good place to rapidly collect large amounts of data. But if you don’t watch out you’ll collect very biased, one-sided data. These were the warning words of the speakers at a symposium on 5 March about transparency and responsible data science.

In Leiden, light particles march into Wolfgang Löffler’s experiments one by one. His research focuses on acquiring the fundamental knowledge needed to develop quantum computers and networks.

How can you figure out which points lie on a certain curve? And how many possible curves do you count by a given number of points? These are the kinds of questions Pim Spelier of the Mathematical Institute studied during his PhD research. Spelier received his doctorate with distinction on June 12.

Van TikTok tot ChatGPT: digitale technologie dringt door in ons hele bestaan. Wat betekent dat voor onderwijs en opvoeding? Het gaat niet om schermtijd, maar om de aard en context van het gebruik, stelt pedagoog Marga Sikkema-De Jong in haar oratie

On March 28, 2023, our esteemed colleague Prof. Harry Wijshoff passed away. He died after a struggle of several months against a serious illness.

Is the child benefits scandal an omen for the future and will people’s lives soon be fully dominated by algorithms? Assistant Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law Reijer Passchier warns that the encroaching digitalisation is giving the executive branch even more power, leaving parliament…

‘Everyone’s talking about it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, but the reality is disappointing,’ says biochemist Gerard van Westen in his 3 October University lecture in the Van der Werfpark. In the full marquee, he gets a laugh with this suggestion that artificial intelligence is comparable…

PhD defence

On 10 May 2021, Melanie Fink and Barbora Budinská published their views on recent developments in the areas of EU regulation of Artificial Intelligence and the Banking Union respectively as Op-Eds on EU Law Live.

Knots come in all shapes and sizes: mariners and scouts can vouch for this. Sjabbo Schaveling will obtain his PhD on 1 September for a mathematical method to distinguish between all these knots. ‘I flatten them to a pretzel.’

Vera van Noort has been appointed Professor in the field of Computational Biology within the Faculty of Science at the Institute of Biology from the 1st of February 2017. Van Noort’s expertise is in bioinformatics and her research focuses on the computational analysis of large-scale biological data…

In recent days and weeks, experts have been falling over themselves to point the finger at the main culprit in the Dutch child benefits scandal. Although this debate is fascinating, equally important are the broader lessons to be drawn from the scandal in relation to constitutional and administrative…

Finding solutions for economically and socially relevant problems in digital data security. That is what Nele Mentens, Professor of Applied Cryptography & Data Security at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), wants to achieve. On 1 June she was appointed to contribute to the institute…

Physicists have manipulated light with large artificial atoms, so-called quantum dots. Before, this has only been done so well with actual atoms. It is an important step towards light-based quantum technology. Publication on August 30th in Nature Communications.

The German professor of Information Systems and Statistics Heike Trautmann accepted the Pascal chair this month at LIACS, the computer science institute of Leiden University. Trautmann’s main research areas are evolutionary multiobjective optimisation and data science, in which LIACS is strong as we…

On 14th April the ARC session Sound, Technology and Listening, dedicated to the presentation of work carried out at the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire, took place through an online public platform. Four students from the second-year research master's at the Institute of Sonology did…

Suzan Verberne has been appointed professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) from 1 October. Verberne has been at LIACS since 2017 as group leader of the Text Mining and Retrieval group.

PhD student Sung-Shik Jongmans of Leiden University and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica investigated a new programming method to simplify this. On 3 March 2016, he graduated with the exceptional predicate 'cum laude' on his dissertation 'Automata-Theoretic Protocol Programming'. His results are interesting…

The particle accelerator of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, produces large amounts of complex data with high accuracy, as a result of which theoretical predictions also need to be more accurate and faster. With his research team, PhD candidate Ben Ruijl developed very innovative…

In relational databases you can store information and data without losing the relationships between those data. They are therefore useful tools for computer scientists. There is, however, a gap between the relational database research community and data scientists. This leads to inefficient use of databases…

This weeks marks the 10th anniversary of the European Research Council. For the past decade, the council has contributed to many scientific projects all over Europe, including Leiden University. It has funded almost 7,000 researchers, leading to just short of 100,000 scientific articles. A total of…

Big Data - Big Business? - wrap up

Leiden physicist Julia Cramer receives 50 thousand euros in funding for 'Let's talk about quantum', a research project on communication about quantum computing. A project for high school students by education expert Henk Buisman is also included in the NEWA ELSA funding.

The Dutch national research organisation NWO has awarded a Veni grant to 21 researchers from Leiden University, two of them are researchers from FGGA: Dovilė Rimkutė and Bart Schuurman.

The standard approach to build a quantum computer with Majoranas as building blocks is to convert them into qubits. However, a promising application of quantum computing—quantum chemistry—would require these qubits to be converted again into so-called fermions. Physicists from Leiden and Delft suggest…

In a global effort, quantum computers are rapidly being developed. In the meantime, researchers have to learn how to write code for these devices, which are fundamentally different from conventional computers. A collaboration of scientists led by Google, and including physicists from Leiden and Delft,…

Three researchers from Leiden University have received awards in the Quantum Technology programme within the National Growth Fund, organised by NWO in collaboration with Quantum Delta NL. Read more about these three futuristic projects.

At the annual World Computer Chess Championship, chess computers from all over the world compete with each other. This year, Leiden University hosted the event.

The Justice and AI Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence is striving to become a European hub of excellence on fairness in AI. Eduard Fosch-Villaronga was invited to explain the role of fairness in robots and AI systems.

An international team of researchers, including scholars from Leiden University, has received a Seed Funding Grant within the Una Europa network. The project, Democracy and AI, focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence on the functioning of democratic systems.

What rules should regulate AI, who should make them, and how will they be enforced in the digital arena?

‘Our health is the area that stands to gain most from artificial intelligence.’ The three universities in Zuid-Holland are helping make these gains. Three researchers talk about their collaborative research into AI for health, drug discovery and healthcare in the AI knowledge cluster in Zuid-Holland.…

An overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2019, as well as special appointments and royal distinctions.

On this page you will find an overview of awards and prizes granted to our staff and students in 2025, as well as special appointments at Leiden University and other institutions.

From academic freedom to security and medical breakthroughs: during Leiden University’s 451st Dies Natalis, the speakers reflected on the role of universities in a world of social and geopolitical tensions.

During her work for the European Union, Sophie Vériter witnessed how young people in countries like Ukraine and Moldova were exposed to Russian propaganda. After mapping out the EU’s disinformation policy, the PhD candidate now advocates for a revised approach.

Professor Anne Meuwese is calling on governments to show more vulnerability when it comes to providing information about how they function.

Governments and public sector organisations consider evidence-based or evidence-informed policymaking as one of the pillars of good governance. That is to say: policies that are informed by scientific knowledge, expertise and evidence. In the research programme 'Power of Evidence', Valérie Pattyn and…