Nematic liquid crystals form the key ingredients of most tv screens. The active version of these complex fluids forms a useful model for physicists to research the responses of active matter—like bacteria or traffic flows—to mechanical and geometrical cues. An international research team publishes their…

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.P. van Wezel, Co-Promotor: E. Vijgenboom

Actinobacteria are Gram-positive bacteria that have a complex multicellular life cycle and are well known for their ability to produce a wide range of bioactive natural products (NPs).

The central question in this book is whether there is a human right to family unification.

The PID-directed shift in PIN polarity has been broadly accepted as one of the essential mechanisms for the regulation of auxin transport polarity.

Dit proefschrift beschrijft een collectie aan alternatieve strategieën voor het begrijpen, ontwerpen en toepassen van lipide nanosystemen, waarin de rol van de bio-nano interacties centraal staan. In het bijzonder wordt gekeken naar de interactie van RNA-lipide nanosystemen, bekend van de toepassing…

Irna Hofman defended her thesis on 10 January 2019.

Promotor: P.J.J. Hooykaas, Co-Promotores: P.B.F. Ouwerkerk, M. Wang

The transition period in which men become fathers might provide an important window of opportunity for parenting interventions that may produce long-term positive effects on paternal care and, consequently, child development. Existing prenatal programs traditionally focus on maternal and infant health…

This project is funded by the Dutch Cancer Society. The project will be part of an ongoing research line aimed at identifying mechanisms of cancer therapy resistance and metastasis. In this project, it will be investigated how the Grainyhead family of transcription factors controls therapy response…

While many healthcare professionals indicate that they frequently use placebo effects and their mechanisms, there is little formal training on how to deal with placebo and nocebo effects in clinical practice. This project aims to address this gap between scientific knowledge on placebo and nocebo effects…

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

Lipid signaling is an essential biological event/process in a plethora of pathophysiological conditions. The underlying idea of this thesis is that many of the roles and the complex interplay of the individual signaling lipids in inflammatory processes and related conditions in health and disease is…

On 3 December 2018 Melanie Fink, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Europa Institute, spoke at the Conference ‘Managing Migration Through Criminal Law Tools’.

What is the effect of training children to exercise self-control? Niko Steinbeis has been awarded a major European subsidy to find the answer to this question. The innovative aspects of this research are the target group, an individual approach to the training and examining the child brain the scann…

This thesis explores different avenues to develop insurmountable antagonists for CC Chemokine Receptors, such as CCR1, CCR2 and CCR5.

Rigid materials break more easily than floppy ones. This simple observation allows to predict and control the width of cracks. Theoretical understanding of how materials break is useful in for example the production of cars or screens. Publication in PNAS.

Promotor: J. Aarts

Reijer Passchier universitair docent Staatrecht in Leiden en hoogleraar Digitalisering en de democratische rechtsstaat aan de Open Universiteit, presenteerde op 11 februari zijn bevindingen over het gebruik van digitale systemen bij de uitvoering van wetten, aan de Vaste Kamercommissie Digitale Zaken,…

How did Fustat develop between 640 and 750 to become the capital of Egypt? At the time Egypt was a province of the Islamic empire - the caliphate - that had been started by the prophet Muhammad. Original sources used by Arabist Jelle Bruning give new insights into the city. PhD defence on 2 April.

On Friday 16 May Juul Eijk successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Which criteria do ED patients and therapists evaluate as most relevant for recovery? Do patients and therapists differ in their evaluations? Do eating disorder patients differ from a healthy control group in their scores on the Recovery Scale?

Promotor: P.D. Grünwald

The receptor nomenclature committee of IUPHAR, the International Union of Pharmacology, has several subgroups. Among these are a few that our division is involved in, those for adenosine, nicotinic acid, and GnRH receptors.

PhD defence

Nature, nurture and neural mechanisms of social emotion regulation in childhood

The increasing competition in the automotive industry requires the tailored, swift development of technologically sophisticated vehicles. Therefore, the computationally expensive state-of-the-art simulation technologies are combined with optimization algorithms. An example of a real-world optimization…

Artificial intelligence systems are smart. They can recognize patterns better than humans, for example. Yet humans are still very much needed. How can you better steer those AI systems? LIACS lecturer Jan van Rijn wrote a book about this together with a number of colleagues. We asked him a few quest…

Researchers at Leiden University have demonstrated that tumours can apply mechanical means to attract the blood vessels they need to be able to grow. The team published this discovery on 2 March in Nature Scientific Reports.

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.P. van Wezel

Why are not all children equally responsive to variations in the social environment?

How did Dutch refugee policies develop during a period in which consecutive coalition cabinets were responsible for these policies during refugee crises between 1913 en 2017 and what were the considerations that can explain this development?

This thesis investigates how non-genetic factors, such as inflammation and concomitant medication, impact hepatic drug metabolism and subsequent drug metabolizing phenotype predictions.

This article devises a framework to assess the degree to which human rights bodies provide duplicating or contradicting recommendations to States. Focusing on the case of torture, it creates an original database of recommendations delivered to 14 countries in the years 2012–2016. Results show that duplications…

Political Scientist Valentina Carraro (Leiden University) devises a framework to assess the degree to which United Nations human rights bodies provide duplicating or contradicting recommendations to states. Focusing on the case of torture, she creates an original database of recommendations delivered…

There are numerous ways in which Asia and the West influence one another. Having a good understanding of the countries of Asia and their inhabitants improves the contacts between these two world regions. Leiden experts have studied Asia for decades from the perspective of different disciplines. Read…

If you could design your own education, how would you do it? That is what the students of the Bachelor Honours Class 'Rebuilding Education' asked themselves. The students were divided into five groups in which they designed workshops to improve education. They presented their workshops in December in…

Cramming from a book, making notes or learning summaries. In the past these were about the only ways to memorise your course material. But that has long since changed. Multimedia is the code word. But is it effective?

Resilient Diversity: the Governance of Racial and Religious Plurality in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800