Hannelore Braeken recently joined the Institute for History as a PhD candidate, as part of Paul van Trigt's NWO project 'Collaborative learning from loneliness' (COLLELO). Below she introduces herself.

Op vrijdag 28 maart vond de Thorbecke-lezing 2025 in Gent plaats, met als thema 'Thorbecke, Trump en de digitale toekomst van het goederenrecht'. Voorafgaand hielden studenten van de Universiteit Leiden en Gent een pleitwedstrijd over hetzelfde onderwerp.

Prof Dr Joke Bouwstra will receive the “ Dr Saal van Zwanenberg Ereprijs” from the “Koninklijke Hollandse Maatschappij der Wetenschappen” on November 14 in Haarlem. Joke is awarded for her innovative contributions to the field of skin delivery science and technology. She shares the price with prof…

Rafał Matuszewski and Kim Beerden, both university lecturers in Ancient History, received a grant from The A.G. Leventis Foundation.

Five researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an Open Competition Domain Science ENW XS grant by the Dutch Research Council for their research projects.

Starting 1 January 2023, Matthias Haentjens has been appointed as Professor of Civil Law at Leiden University. His expertise lies in the field of property law, insolvency law, and private international law.

After an intensive tender procedure, Leiden University and the Municipality of Oegstgeest have chosen Dura Vermeer for a new housing development with plenty of affordable homes in Nieuw Rhijngeest-Zuid. Dura Vermeer seeks to create a green and playful neighbourhood with welcoming public spaces as its…

Organisation

Martina Huber, Jacqueline Labra Munoz research Alzheimer's disease. They study ferritine, iron storage in the brain. An inbalance of iron could play a role in this form of dementia.

How do classroom demonstration experiments help students learn chemical reasoning? Marie-Jetta den Otter, PhD student at ICLON, researched this. She defends her thesis on 6 December.

Chronic pain, nausea or vomiting due to chemotherapy. If you suffer from such ailments, medicinal cannabis can be a godsend. Though a downside is that it can make patients high. Therefore, Leiden researchers from the Oncode Institute are investigating alternatives that do not make you high. In Nature…

Depression or ADHD? Neatly delineated diagnoses fail to do justice to the infinitely complex reality that they refer to, argues Eiko Fried in a new paper for JAMA Psychiatry. His proposal: to map the underlying mechanisms of mental health problems using a Mental Health Atlas.

The Caribbean as we know it today is fundamentally a product of colonial activity and globalisation. Practically everyone that inhabits the Caribbean has ancestors from different continents due to colonial activity, which profoundly affects the area to this day. Caribbean writers, both in the Caribbean…

In the Changemakers Lab course, psychology students Diana Shalkivska (left in the picture) and Anna Rytirova discover what happens when academic knowledge meets real-world complexity.

Vincent van Heuven passed away unexpectedly on Friday 6 February 2026 at the age of 76 at his home in Kûbaard (Friesland), the Netherlands.

Recently, Engin Yüksel gave a lecture on Russian military concepts from 1853 to the present day and his observations on the Russo-Ukrainian war at the Faculty of Humanities, premised on his recently completed doctoral research.

The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged political leaders worldwide, bringing discussion about leadership in times of crisis. In various media outlets, a recurring topic has been the relationship between the gender of a country’s leader and the success of his or her Covid-19 approach. Especially female…

Education, Research

'Engaging With Everyday Sounds' is a rich and inspiring exploration of the role of sounds in everyday life, including their impact on human actions, emotions, and imagination. Marcel Cobussen intertwines sonic studies with philosophy, sound art, sociology and more to create an impressively lucid and…

Simulations of galaxy formation provide much more information about galaxies than a telescope. Simulations have been improving significantly in recent years. Astronomer Evgenii Chaikin made such a significant contribution to this field that he graduated with honours on February 27th.

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.

Tahir Abbas, Professor of Radicalisation Studies at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, is organising a book launch for his new book: 'Ruminations: Framing a sense of self and coming to terms with the other'. The book launch will take place on Thursday 15 December from 16.00-17.00 hrs. at…

Without academic freedom, we might not have antibiotics, nor a deep understanding of human behaviour. Literary criticism, climate models, and ecological restoration would be severely limited; just like ethical reflection on artificial intelligence, justice, trauma, parenting, faith and hope. All these…

The question of land property titles is a common source of conflict between indigenous communities and federal authorities all over the Americas. A new Panamanian law have led indigenous communities to reach out to archaeologist Dr Natalia Donner. A grant from the Centre for Indigenous American Studies…

Researchers at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) have managed to culture human heart muscle cells on a massive scale. This is an exceptional achievement because it is very difficult to replicate heart muscle cells outside the body. Using a special technique, the researchers have now created…

PhD candidate Jiangnan Ding explores how you can design a thick slab of rubber in a way that it might act as a mechanical computer bit. This so-called mechanical metamaterial is pushed in a specific way to change its shape. ‘With a very simple material, we might be able to do simple calculations in…

Five Leiden research projects in history, law and AI have received SSH Open Competition M 2024 funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The researchers have up to five years to work on a promising idea.

Physicist Kaveh Lahabi’s research on quantum materials led to the launch of a new company: QuantaMap. With his colleagues, he developed a sensor that will improve the production of quantum computer chips. ‘It turns out that what I need for my fundamental physics research is also very useful for the…

Physicist Milan Allan will build an instrument that will bring superconductivity research further. He has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of 2 million euros over the next five years. With his PairNoise programme he aims to detect paired electrons as they occur just above the temperature at which…

On 21 June, our beloved colleague Joan van der Waals passed away after a long and rewarding life.

Professor Maartje van der Woude, Professor of Law & Society at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, has been appointed as one of the three new series editors for the Routledge Studies in Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship.

Ludo Waltman, professor of Quantitative Science Studies at Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), has been awarded the Derek de Solla Price Medal.

Luuk van Middelaar and Vestert Borger, both affiliated with the Europa Institute of Leiden University, have recently been awarded a research grant by the Statesman Thorbecke Fund Programme of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The aim of the fund is to promote knowledge about…

Before coming to Leiden, Dr. Stökl was Reader in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament at Kings College London.

The New Scholar, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal at the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University, is launching its first issue, and how? With a double issue!

Dr. Brackney is a modern European intellectual and cultural historian with a Ph.D. from Yale University. Before coming to Leiden, she held postdoctoral teaching posts in the History & Literature program at Harvard University and the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago.

Francesco Ragazzi (Institute of Political Science), Julian Ross (Center for the Arts in Society) and Mark Westmoreland (Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology) set up the interdisciplinary research centre ReCNTR.

As of April 2022, Mark de Rooij has been appointed SAILS Professor AI and Data Theory at the Institute of Psychology. This position will enable him to contribute to the goal of the interdisciplinary programme: to build on and expand the current expertise on AI within Leiden University, working from…

In the first episode of the podcast series, Andrei Marin, Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, interviews Marja Spierenburg, Professor of Anthropology of Sustainability and Livelihoods and Scientific Director at Leiden University, along with Diana Vela Almeida, Assistant…

On 15 June 2022 Professor Anthropology of Sustainability and Livelihood Marja Spierenburg was one of the invited speakers at the round table in the House of Representatives of The Netherlands.

Metamaterials researcher Martin van Hecke has been elected American Physical Society (APS) fellow, an honour exclusive to only half a percent of the society's members.

Klara Beslmüller

ICT

On Sunday, November 9 2025, Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey presented a film at the “Eastern Neighbors” Film Festival in The Hague.

Writing a book on the recent history of Leiden University in corona times. For educational and policy historian Pieter Slaman (34), this has meant working in the attic of his parents’ house while they looked after his daughter, along with numerous online conversations and very few, if any, visits to…

Towards the end of February, three Leiden University buildings will be assessed for their accessibility to people with a disability. The assessment will be carried out by Ongehinderd, a social enterprise committed to making the Netherlands more accessible. Its founder and director, Gerard de Nooij,…

Leiden University is part of a Dutch consortium that will receive 4.7 million euros from NWO to build a facility that makes controlled, thin layers of material. The facility can produce small and large films, something that is globally unique. And that is key to scaling up, for example, new catalysts…

She develops algorithms that outperform leading optimization techniques and can be applied in many fields. For this work, Niki van Stein and her team have won the GECCO Humies Award. ‘With our method, we can create and refine algorithms for a wide range of applications—algorithms that are better than…

Seven hundred and three independent student flats will be built in the entrance area of the Leiden Bio Science Park (LBSP), close to the University Sports Centre. Construction will begin this year and the accommodation is expected to be completed by the start of academic year 2023-2024.