An NWO Veni application by Linda Geven, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, has been honoured. She will spend the next three years conducting research into false confessions in police interrogations.

Good teaching isn’t as easy as it might seem. In November, the Month of Open Teaching, staff at Leiden University therefore have the opportunity to ‘spy’ on talented colleagues. ‘We are making it as easy as possible to see what the neighbours are up to.’

For students who want to be an intermediary between scientific experts, policy makers and politicians in the domain of sustainability, the master programme Governance of Sustainabiliy might be just what they are looking for. Leiden University intends to start this new The Hague based programme in September…

Which collaborative learning approaches already exist in conservatoire education, and how could such approaches be implemented? This is the subject of Tamara Rumiantsev’s (PhD candidate at ICLON) thesis. Defence on 14 April 2022.

Jelle van Buuren, Assistant Professor Institute of Security and Global Affairs, discusses why extremist-right activists can be found in the corona-sceptic movement in Dutch News Magazine One World.

Are you an ambitious student looking to get the most out of your time at university?

In the research theme ‘Animal Sciences and Health’, we work with various animal species to gain insights into fundamental biological processes in both animals and humans.

Both the international perspective and the Dutch language and culture are deeply embedded in Leiden University’s identity.

Queer youths seeking asylum in the Netherlands are not adequately protected. The system that assesses asylum claims lacks child-specific processes and often fails to notice these youths' suffering.

The Leiden University Europe Hub approaches Europe from a broad and inclusive perspective.

A team of laboratory astrophysicists from Leiden University managed to make glycerol under conditions comparable to those in dark interstellar clouds. They allowed carbon monoxide ice to react with hydrogen atoms at minus 250 degrees Celsius. The researchers publish their findings in the Astrophysical…

Professor Herman Paul has been appointed Scientific Director of the Institute of History from 1 February 2025. ‘Especially in these times, transparency is essential.’

Occupational health in the Emergency Department

This research cluster explores processes of cultural creation, reception and transformation within a wide range of societal contexts from the early Middle Ages until c. 1800.

Health is a wonderful gift, both for humans and for society. If we are able to prevent both physical and mental illnesses, we can spare a lot of suffering and fight rising health costs. Social scientists and physicians in Leiden are working closely together to conduct research on the human mental, behavioural…

How can we develop new chemical biology tools and approaches to understand and interfere with glucosylceramide metabolism in relation to Gaucher disease?

When focussing attention, the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and acetylcholine play an important role. This new finding made by psychologist Stephen Brown provides clues for further research on how focussed attention comes about. Dissertation defence on 16 June.

How will future technological developments influence our everyday lives? This is the key question during the Brave New World symposium on 2 and 3 November.

Leiden University’s Executive Board (CvB) visited Leiden University College in The Hague on Friday 11 November during a working visit tour past the Institutes of the Faculty Governance and Global Affairs. Hester Bijl and Martijn Ridderbos were provided with an overview of the programme, the research,…

The STAP study examines the cost-effectiveness of Written Exposure Therapy (WET) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in primary care settings.

The Executive Board of Leiden University has asked the University Council to advise on its proposed decision to reactivate the person counters/sensors in due course. The Council will now look at this carefully before the Board makes a final decision. The advice of the University’s participation body…

Can dynamic testing provide us with insight in children’s potential for learning?

For a certain period the municipality of The Hague collaborated with the Salafist Quba mosque. The reason for the collaboration was to keep an eye on for radicalised youngsters. But as the collaboration progressed, the mosque became a breeding ground for Jihadists.

Jelle van Buuren, university lecturer at ISGA, discusses the role that social media played in the storming of the Capitol last Wednesday

The combination of academic and professional skills you gain in the MSc PA makes you an excellent candidate for positions in national and international governance and policy making, as well as for managerial positions in the private sector, after graduation.

The Programme Standards project sets out guidelines on how to structure the education offered at the Faculty of Humanities. The project aims to distribute the teaching effort in a transparent way and to organise the programmes so that the best possible teaching can be provided in an efficient manner,…

In this flash interview we get a flash introduction of our President and alumna Annetje Ottow.

Learning a programming language is challenging. Even one of the first –but crucial– concepts to learn, variables, is hard to grasp. Variables can represent different roles and functions within a code and need to be named appropriately to support code comprehension and debugging.

The aim of this project is to foster a historiography that does justice both to the realization that scientific knowledge is constructed by local, contingent, and contextual processes, and the claims of science to objective validity.

On Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Professor Saskia Jaszoltowski, the new Visiting Professor for Central European Studies at Leiden University joined students, colleagues and friends of Austrian Studies at Leiden for a lunch-time talk that introduced her exciting research to our community.

Context-based learning has been implemented in secondary chemistry education. Hans Vogelzang, PhD at ICLON, reseached whether Scrum methodology might support creating context-based lessons. Scrum appears to be beneficial to learning outcomes. Defence on 10 November.

The LACDR represents the core of bio-pharmaceutical research at Leiden University, and we interact closely with our partners:

Does powerlessness and dependence lead to the legitimation of the social, political, and economic status quo and of those in authority?

Thomas Bäck wins the 2015 IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award for his contributions in synthesizing evolutionary computation.

As of 1 September, Jeroen van Zon started as professor by special appointment in Quantitative Developmental Biology at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL). Van Zon is also group leader of Quantitative Developmental Biology at the physics research institute AMOLF. Three questions about his new role…

A virtual hand that feels as if it is your own. Feeling happier because a virtual face is smiling with you. Cognitive Psychologist Ke Ma discovered using virtual reality that the way we experience our body is more flexible than we thought. Ma: ‘We can think up some fantastic applications.' PhD defence…

Together, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Leiden University and Philips are one of the 17 AI labs within the ROBUST consortium that will receive support from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The aim of this collaboration is to use artificial intelligence to speed up MRI scans.

Two Leiden scientists - Ignas Snellen and Bernhard Hommel - have been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. The grant will fund their research over the coming five years on exoplanets and free will.

Prof. Bernhard Hommel has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). With this grant of 2.5 million euros the cognitive psychologist will conduct a five years research on metacontrol; a study on how we determine the impact of our goals on our actual behaviour.

This header image was once elected Image of the Week by De Volkskrant and won second place in the LION Image Award. The research behind it is no less successful if we’re counting prizes. Last August, group leader Tjerk Oosterkamp was awarded an NWO Projectruimte grant, and now NWO-TTW grants him an…

In a recent study, Dr. Moji Aghajani and colleagues show that adolescents with a severe form of Conduct Disorder (CD) -with limited prosocial emotions- require an unusually large amount of brain capacity to read emotional faces. These effects were found in comparison to CD youth without limited prosocial…

Conference

Jelle van Buuren, assistant professor at ISGA, discusses the way conspiracy theories and thinkers should be viewed at NPO3

The Faculty of Archaeology is pleased to announce that Dr Sarah Schrader has been appointed as the new Head of the Department of Archaeological Sciences (DV). In April 2026 she succeeds Dr Jason Laffoon, who has led the department for the past six years.

Political scientist Karolina Pomorska (Institute of Political Science, Leiden University) has been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair. The aim of her chair, entitled The EU and the World, is to promote and strengthen teaching and research in European Studies in Leiden and in The Hague.

In the Educatips column, Psychology lecturers share their most valuable insights on teaching. This month: Laura Nawijn and colleagues are designing an e-learning programme to improve the thesis supervision of clinical psychologists. ‘You don’t want to hold students’ hands, but you do want to give them…

From a lovely blossoming garden in Barcelona, Eduard Fosch Villaronga is talking enthusiastically about his postdoc at Leiden University. Due to the corona lockdown, he is currently spending the 2020 summer at his mother’s place, but he is looking forward to returning to Leiden (and to the Dutch bit…

On 14 and 15 September, the 'Lobbying the Courts' workshop took place in Paris. This was an interdisciplinary workshop in which researchers from different disciplines came together to brainstorm on whether, how, and when interest groups focus on the judicial process and the courts in their lobbying…

At the heart of this study is a thorough inquiry of categorisations of social identity used in the VOC’s record-keeping bureaucracy. How were service, occupational and caste groups classified and shaped by the VOC?