Following the Big Bang, structure in the Universe started collapsing under the force of gravity. This resulted in the formation of the first stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

The Leiden Slavery Studies Association (LSSA) is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of slavery and post-slavery in any period and any geographical region.

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families—one knightly and one mercantile—with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and…

Kaveh Lahabi's lab explores the exotic physics of quantum materials, whose underlying physics seems to have more in common with elementary particles and black holes, than ordinary metals and semiconductors.

Multiple stars, that is two or more stars composing a gravitationally bound system, are common in the universe.

In his book The magic of healing, Willem van der Does talks about 14 pioneers in the history of psychiatry. These pioneers all had one thing in common: they started with a radical idea which led to great enthusiasm.

The Jeugdwerkgroep is a national astronomy association for young people who are interested in astronomy. The Leiden section organizes a monthly meeting in the Old Observatory Leiden.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

Elizabeth Stuart is one the most misrepresented – and underestimated – figures of the seventeenth century. Daughter of James VI & I, she was married to Frederick V, Elector Palatine in 1613 – they were crowned King and Queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be deposed and exiled to the Dutch Republic in…

It is a common technique in global optimization with expensive black-box functions to learn a surrogate-model of the response function from past evaluations and use it to decide on the location of future evaluations.

The radio sky harbours both galactic and extragalactic sources of arcminute- to degree-scale emission of various physical origins. To discover extragalactic diffuse emission in the Cosmic Web beyond galaxy clusters, one must image low–surface brightness structures amidst a sea of brighter compact fore-…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Zaanen, A. Parnachev

Although nanoparticles are extensively used in various applications like consumer products and have most probably entered the environment, little is known about the effects of these particles on living organisms.

Everything you need to know about the minor American Studies.

Promotor: W. Jaffe, Co-promotor: K. Meisenheimer

The high velocity tail of the total velocity distribution of stars provides essential insight into fundamental properties of the Galaxy.

Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political turmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens.

Team Economic and Social History

The excuses for the slavery past? It would have been better if the cabinet had taken some more time on that, thinks university lecturer and Atlantic slavery expert Karwan Fatah-Black. 'Too bad they didn’t wait for the results of the study.'

Anke Klein and her team have devised a fun and useful app to help anxious children. In the app, children can upload a video of themselves showing, for example, something that went well for them and share their success with parents, granny or grandad. Developmental psychologist Klein talks about the…

‘By cleverly combining new techniques for analysing DNA at the level of individual molecules, we can achieve real breakthroughs in research into conditions such as dementia,’ predicts Professor John van Noort. Together with four leading biophysics research groups, he has written a review article in…

Leiden University's Citizen Science Lab supports and organizes initiatives where anyone can get started with scientific data and research. This is how we enrich research with insights from the community, make science accessible to all, and tackle important local issues together.

Artificial intelligence can help doctors analyse images such as MRI scans. In future it may even be able to predict how a tumour will grow. And that is badly needed to relieve the pressure on healthcare workers.

Professor of Fungal Genetics and Biotechnology Arthur Ram explains how fungi can help us be more sustainable.

Persecution, conflicts and crises threaten academic facilities and researchers worldwide. This has major implications for science. Leiden University's Scholars for Scholars programme helps scientists in need through crowdfunding.

This week Leiden student Roos Kolkman will be campaigning throughout the country to win the votes of Dutch youth in order to become the next UN Youth Delegate for Sustainable Development.

For the first time, we’re seeing what Euclid sees. The telescope’s initial observations have provided a wealth of new information about our universe. But according to cosmologist Alessandra Silvestri, this is just the beginning. The research helps us gain a deeper understanding of the past, present,…

Many primary school children suffer from anxiety and their numbers are increasing. Psychologists from the Knowledge Center Anxiety & Stress (KAS) are developing and researching preventive training.

Like spoken languages, sign languages evolve organically and do not always have the same origin. This produces different ways of communication and annotation. Manolis Fragkiadakis wrote his PhD thesis on this.

AI can help scientists to collect data about the earth faster. This saves them a lot of time on trying to figure out how to analyze all the data they collect. Julia Wasala, PhD student at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Sciences(LIACS), tells us how AI can be used to save time.

Receiving positive support and seeing yourself as being a quitter may help smokers quit, say Eline Meijer and colleagues. The health psychologists published their study in Social Science & Medicine.

Electrical inner ear prostheses like Cochlear Implants (CIs) help deaf and severely hearing-impaired persons to regain many of their communication abilities. The performance of CI in social environments is, however, not optimal. The new "Machine learning To Enhance teMPoral cOding foR cochleAr impLants“…

The Dutch PVV party has proposed a legislative amendment that would make helping illegal immigrants a criminal offence. Joanne van der Leun, Professor of Criminology, spoke to NRC newspaper about the criminalisation of illegality: ‘It’s absurd.’

De Regenboog primary school in The Hague has a high percentage of children whose first language is not Dutch. In the ‘Children of the City’ project, Education and Child Studies students help primary school children practise their Dutch.

During your studies you have to make a lot of choices. And there are so many possibilities, you sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees. Where do I want to do an internship? What are my options on the job market? Students Justin and Seif were also struggling with these questions, so they called on…

Spirits play a important role in post-colonial and minority literature as a means of processing black pages from history, according to literary scientist Chia-Sui Lee. PhD defence 11 January.

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) has just launched its COVID Radar app. Users of the app are asked to regularly complete a short questionnaire about their health, regardless of whether they are ill or not. This will give the researchers a good idea of the current spread of coronavirus in the…

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

Last semester, bachelor’s students in Religious Studies spent a lot of time in community centres in Leiden. The reason: field research into loneliness in the city.

Medical psychologist Willeke Kitselaar developed a model that helps identify patients with persistent somatic symptoms earlier, based on an extensive large medical database. ‘I advise GPs to ask patients to fill in a questionnaire about both physical and mental symptoms at an earlier stage.’ PhD defence…

This semester we again organize the elective Nitrogen and Sustainability for 36 master students mainly from Industrial Ecology and Governance of Sustainability. The course helps the students to understand the complexity of the Dutch nitrogen crisis and the role different stakeholders play.

How do surgeons avoid causing nerve damage or leaving cancerous cells behind? An interdisciplinary research group at the LUMC hopes to improve operations and make them less invasive with the aid imaging techniques. They are working with medical companies to make these techniques widely available.

Its idyllic setting and white sandy beaches have made the Maldives a hotspot for tourists. This provides an income but is a problem for the fragile natural environment. Students from various universities worked with the local people to make the soil more fertile. How did they go about it?

During the bachelor’s programme Astronomy you will immerse yourself in questions about our universe. Questions such as: ‘what happens in a black hole?’ and ‘what is dark matter?’ In doing so you will learn to apply mathematics and physics to astronomical problems and you will work with computer simulations…

The Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo the full rigours of European colonisation. By the early nineteenth century, they had largely been brought under colonial rule, dispossessed of their land and stock, and forced to work as labourers for farmers of European descent.

This publication of the School of Advanced Study of the University of London is one of the outcomes of the Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project and the Colonial Rural Networks project (NWO, Dr. T.D. Stek). The volume, edited by Tesse Stek and prof. Gert-Jan Burgers of the Free University Amsterdam,…