The opening of the Academic Year 2025-2026 took place on Monday 1 September 2025 in the Pieterskerk church.

We as Young Academy Leiden are continuously educating ourselves and are listening to the voices coming from our own university, especially the young academics.

Language connects us! We are here to help you! The Academic Language Centre (ATC) is the language centre of Leiden University. As the oldest university language centre in the Netherlands, we offer language courses in a wide range of languages, both for beginners and advanced students. All courses are…

The Academic Language Centre has developed 10 video clips on Academic Presenting. Watch them below for a good start to your studies!

To help you improve your skills in communicating about your research in English, the Graduate School has an in-house Academic English Lecturer.

Steps to take if Leiden University needs to verify your academic records.

Scientific integrity is an essential element in the PhD trajectory and is addressed in several different settings.

In this part of the LUC Newsletter Archive you can find the newsletters of block 3 and 4 of academic year 2019 - 2020.

Prospective employers sometimes request a certified copy of your diploma or your academic transcript. These certified copies can be provided by the University. You can also apply to the University for advice on having your diploma translated.

Academic ceremony

Research into research improves the academic system. CWTS studies and evaluates the academic system in various ways. One way is to provide information on the productivity and impact of academics by documenting how many publications they or their universities produce and how often these publications…

Travel back in time and learn about how the University has changed over the centuries.

Researchers at LED3 are working together with biopharmaceutical company Galapagos to develop software for use in early drug discovery (funded by NWO). This software is able to design molecules with several simultaneously optimized characteristics and will also take prediction reliability into consideration…

Pharmaceutical research should make more use of data science, says Gerard van Westen, postdoctoral fellow at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR). ‘If we want to have better drugs, we should start with data.’

The Academic Language Centre has developed 19 video clips on Academic Skills. The videos are divided into three categories. Watch them below for a good start to your studies!

De opening of the Academic Year 2021-2022 took place on Monday 6 September 2021 in Pieterskerk church.

The opening of the Academic Year 2024-2025 took place on Monday 2 September 2024 in the Pieterskerk church.

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The opening of the Academic Year 2017-2018 took place on Monday 4 September 2017 in Pieterskerk church.

De opening of the Academic Year 2023-2024 took place on Monday 4 September 2023 in Pieterskerk church.

De opening of the Academic Year 2022-2023 took place on Monday 5 September 2022 in Pieterskerk church.

The opening of the Academic Year 2019-2020 took place on Monday 2 September 2019 in Pieterskerk church.

The opening of the Academic Year 2018-2019 took place on Monday 3 September 2018 in Pieterskerk church.

The opening of the Academic Year 2020-2021 took place on Monday 31 August 2020 in Pieterskerk church.

The opening of the Academic Year 2016-2017 took place on Monday 5 September 2016 in Pieterskerk church.

Jasper de Bruin, Guus Besuijen, Hans Siemons & Jeroen van Zoolingen (2012). De romeinse nederzetting bij het tegenwoordige Goedereede heeft waarschijnlijk een belangrijke functie gehad in de overslag en distributie van diverse goederen, waaronder keramiek en voedingsgewassen. De opgraving van deze nederzetting…

Supervisor: Gerard van Westen

Researchers of the Leiden Leadership Centre are active members of the PUPOL network. PUPOL is an international academic network for public and political leadership which fosters exchange of ideas and inspires collaborative research among scholars focusing on the role of leadership in the public and…

The available tools for academic literature search return a list of ranked documents, which might not be ideal for some tasks. To facilitate these tasks, I am creating a visual representation of the academic search space where the user can browse academic topics.

Gerard van Westen and his group, together with pharmaceutical company Galapagos, start on developing software that invents new effective molecules. They will receive an NWO LIFT grant of 280,000 euros, of which 63,000 euros will come from Galapagos. The company will also bring its expertise in biology,…

Research Schools aim at collaboration between researchers from different faculties (interfaculty schools) and universities (interuniversity schools).

‘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…

The Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR) is a centre of excellence for multidisciplinary research on drug discovery and development.

The primary goal of GAP is to study the impact of globalization and internationalization policies and practices on the gender balance in research and higher education in Norway.

Not experiments and lab coats, but computers and artificial intelligence: this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the inventors of the groundbreaking AI model, AlphaFold. This programme accurately predicts protein structures based on their genetic code—a crucial step in understanding biological…

There are more molecules that could conceivably be candidate drugs than there are stars in the universe. How can we ever efficiently identify those molecules? Professor of AI and Medicinal Chemistry, Gerard van Westen: ‘I’m going to use artificial intelligence as the co-pilot to make an automated search.’…

This project seeks to develop a conceptual framework and provide empirical evidence on academic leadership that builds a fairer world and fosters trust in polarised times.

Learn to program, gain knowledge of AI methods, or use it in a research project at the LACDR. With the introduction of the innovative digital learning environment ‘Digital Labcoat’, Biopharmaceutical Sciences bachelor students can further develop their computational skills.

Accelerating the development of new cancer medicines by joining forces—that’s the mission of Oncode Accelerator, a Dutch consortium that recently welcomed three Leiden-based PhD candidates. Under the guidance of Gerard van Westen, Marc Boef, Remco van den Broek, and Lucina-May Nollen are exploring how…

On Friday the 29th of October, LACDR presented highlights of its research and teaching program during an online Lunchtime Talk session at the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

A next, general pharmacological problem to be tackled is how drug-target binding kinetics in vivo, affects target occupancy as an important indicator of the time-course of drug effects.

Nobody is better qualified to tell you what it is like to work at Leiden University than the employees themselves. Watch the videos and meet your future colleagues. They will be happy to share their experiences with you.

Promoting academic equity for students with ADHD through evidence-based accommodations and inclusive teaching methods in higher education.

The coronavirus has the world in its grip. Finding a cure has never been more important. Unfortunately, the development of new drugs for treatment of the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus and development of a vaccine are complex, lengthy, and above all costly processes. With the help of computer…

‘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.…

The central goal of academic publishers is the dissemination of the results of research and scholarship. Their audiences can generally be divided into two categories. Academic publications are firstly made accessible to the scholarly community, so that these texts can form the input for new academic…

What is the impact of research-based learning on critical thinking competence and academic achievement in undergraduate education? What are underlying factors of research-based learning in the learning environment?

A cancer pill, preferably without severe side effects, is something we’d all welcome. Is it a matter of time before such a pill is a reality? We put this question to three Leiden researchers and asked how they themselves are contributing to new cancer treatments.

The Faculty of Science has reinforced the collaboration in China during a group trip late November. Representatives from four institutes visited ten Chinese top universities and interviewed over 130 students in PhD workshops in Beijing and Shanghai.