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

Fancy seeing how your job is done at a university abroad? Project Managers Christina Schlüpen and Jeannette de Wolf from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry did just that. They both spent a week shadowing a European colleague: one in Bologna and the other in Berlin. This was through the Una Europe alliance,…

Peter Slort is the highly driven portfolio holder for Diversity with the Dutch National Police. Since November 2016 he has been spreading the importance of diversity throughout the police organisation.

A remarkable population of short period transiting rocky exoplanets with equilibrium temperatures on the order of 2,000 K has recently been discovered.

This year, in a three-part symposium series, we are exploring how interdisciplinary collaboration can be promoted at the university. In the second session in March, the attendees discovered that understanding your rhythm and perspective is essential when embarking on an interdisciplinary project.

Having flirted with Egyptology and Italian, Dieuwertje Kuijpers found her true calling in the Master’s in European Union Studies. She is now a freelance journalist specialising in politics, security and defence. But she is also at home writing columns for ThePostOnline and hard-hitting articles for…

Using E. coli bacteria to convert a toxic compound in the soil on Mars into oxygen to make life on the planet possible. A team of thirteen Leiden students are taking part in the annual iGEM competition with an entry based on this idea. iGEM is an international competition for students where they use…

The current COVID-19 vaccination campaign involves injecting the vaccine into muscle tissue, but injecting a smaller amount of vaccine in the skin might also provide good protection. The #wakeuptocorona crowdfunding campaign has enabled Anna Roukens (LUMC) to examine the safety and efficacy of vaccination…

The goal of target discovery is to identify and validate proteins and biological pathways that are involved in the disease process. Modulating these target proteins and pathways with small molecules, therapeutic proteins or other biomolecules (e.g. mRNA) could deliver an effective and safe drug or v…

Ariane Briegel wants to use bacteria to detect cancer at an early stage. Together with postdoc Alise Muok, she is developing a method to quickly and cheaply test the urine of patients for the presence of suspicious molecules. They receive a grant of approximately 150,000 euros from the Dutch Cancer…

PhD defence

Effects of maternal smoking, premature birth, intra-uterine growth retardation and asphyxia on child development.

In this thesis an activity-based probe was discovered that could visualize the activity of PLAATs. With an optimized gel-based ABPP assay in hand, screening of a compound library led to the discovery of alpha-ketoamides as a hit for PLAAT3.

Promotores: Prof.dr. J.N. Kok, Prof.dr. C.A. Mandemakers, Co-Promotor: G. Bloothooft

National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members. Angelo Romano, Matthias Sutter, James Liu, Toshio Yamagishi & Daniel Balliet studied national parochialism across different nations and conclude in their publication in Nature Communications that it is a ubiquitous…

Rutsel Martha, former Minister of Justice of the Dutch Antilles, former General Counsel of Interpol and alumnus of Universiteit Leiden, elaborated on the position of states and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in international financial law.

Language learners in higher education increasingly conduct out-of-class self-directed learning facilitated by mobile technology. This project aims to explore how university students use mobile technology for their self-directed language learning and investigate factors that influence their self-directed…

The objective is to develop in vitro antigen degradation assays in order to mimic the fate of the antigen in vivo.

Occupational health in the Emergency Department

Some children and adolescents find it hard to attend school because of anxiety and/or depression, a problem which is often referred to as school refusal. The main research question is how we can best help these young people reduce their emotional distress and increase their school attendance in order…

The car we buy is made out of thousands of components, which are produced using different types of materials. These materials need to be sourced from different places, sent to production facilities and assembled. Once the car is dismissed, the components need to be taken care of by either reusing, recycling…

Metabolomicshas emerged as an important discipline to study molecular and cellular processes in living cells and organisms with the ultimate aim to obtain an answer to a given biological/clinical question.

Research groups in the Biological & Soft Matter Programme unravel mechanisms in biological processes and develop novel bio-inspired soft materials.

In the research programme Drug Discovery & Safety, we are interested in the efficacy and safety of new drugs and novel means to decipher these aspects. Hence, we employ advanced imaging and high-throughput screening techniques next to computational approaches such as chem- and bioinformatics.

Assistant Professor Vedran Dunjko and his team received a gift from Google to support their quantum research. The research focuses on whether quantum computers can provide new ways of understanding the mysteries of high-energy physics.

The NEASQC project brings together academic experts and industrial end-users to investigate and develop a new breed of Quantum-enabled applications that can take advantage of NISQ (Noise Intermediate-Scale Quantum) systems in the near future. NEASQC is use-case driven, addressing practical problems…

This paper series is the result of two rounds of PhD workshops organized by the editors at the TMC Asser Institute and Leiden University in 2024 on ‘The legal implications of the EU’s geopolitical awakening’, with the generous financial assistance of the Municipality of The Hague.

The institute hosts criminal lawyers and criminologists who engage in high-quality scientific research that is also relevant for society.

This project is situated within the context of an innovation of the biology curriculum in Dutch secondary schools. The main purposes are (1) to clarify the relation between teachers’ practical knowledge and the decisions they make when planning and implementing their lessons and (2) to develop a professional…

This dissertation focuses on irregular patterns in Vedic Grammar and Poetry.

In a newly published book chapter, Transparency and information: Factors needed to promote ethical investments, ELS lab member Sarah Vandenbroucke discusses why information and transparency are needed to promote ethical investments.

Social impact and circular economy. Two topics focusing on the future and bringing forward many concrete problems. Two Master Honours Classes, in which students tackle societal challenges, will start this fall.

What is your preferred career path? Would you like to teach? Do you enjoy doing research? Or would you prefer a job that involves writing and editing? You will find that your Linguistics degree is a perfect preparation for the career of your choice.

Source: Biosens Bioelectron, Volume 74, pp. 233-42 (2015)

Could an emergent Cinema of Un-Belonging discover forms of narrative time relevant to the long-term, inter-generational fractures caused by forced traumatic dispersion?

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

The intestinal bacterium E. coli can adapt to changes in its surroundings. Leiden scientists have discovered how the H-NS protein makes this possible. This new knowledge can be an important starting point in combatting bacteria and diseases such as peritonitis. Publication 2 October in the journal e…

Leiden University's team participated in the 2023 edition of the Day of Crisis Competition and emerged as Second Runners Up to the Best Team Award and Second Runners Up to the Best Written Advice Award.

Knowledge and culture subproject 1:

β-Lactamases are enzymes that can break down β-lactam substrates, such as antibiotics, preventing the use of these antibiotics for the treatment of various infectious diseases. However, some compounds, β-lactamase inhibitors, can block these enzymes allowing for possible treatments using a combination…

This dissertation investigates whether and how gradability is manifested in the nominal domain, as well as the implications this could have for theories of the representation of gradability.

Mouse models are commonly used to assess the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins and to investigate the immunological processes leading to antidrug antibodies. The aim of this work was to develop a transgenic (TG) Balb/c mouse model for evaluating the immunogenicity of recombinant human insulin (insulin)…