Ed van den Berg, MBA, will succeed Dirkje Schinkelshoek from 1 September as interim member of the Faculty Board of the Science Faculty, responsible for operational management.

As of 1 April 2025, Lodewijk Govaerts will be standing down from the Board of Governors due to other commitments that will demand a significant part of his time and attention within the foreseeable future. Govaerts does not want this to affect his ability to fulfil his role on the Board of Governors…

The valedictory lecture of former rector magnificus Hester Bijl was buried on Tuesday 12 May in the garden of the Kamerlingh Onnes Building (KOG). Where did this young, and slightly eccentric, university tradition come from?

What’s it like to be Rector Magnificus in the current climate? Sarah de Rijcke spoke about this on the radio. She has been at the helm of Leiden University since the start of this year, at a time when academic freedom is under increased pressure.

Yisheng Development is to design the entrance area to the Leiden Bio Science Park. Leiden University and the municipality of Leiden selected this Amstelveen-based project developer on the basis of their sustainable design for a vibrant campus. The design provides a combination of residential, working…

On Monday 23 November, Ms Simonetta Cook, member of the Cabinet of the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, addressed master's students following the LLM European Law Programme. She shared valuable insights on what it is like working for the European Council, in addition to some of her…

Portraits that gaze at you and have moving stories to tell: HEAR ME NOW says what usually remains unsaid.

Between January and April 2017 Armin Cuyvers (Assistant Professor of European Law) will be a Visiting Fellow at the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC), the in-house think-tank of European Commission President Juncker.

When talking about innovative technologies, Blockchain should certainly be mentioned. In the Honours Class ‘Board the Blockchain Train!’, students learn about the influence of technology on, for example, banking transactions or real estate appraisal.

This academic year Maxim Allaart will hold the position of assessor within the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Science. The assessor is a student member who represents the students’ interests within the Faculty Board.

The Executive Board of Leiden University appointed Dr. Johannes Magliano-Tromp as interim member of the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs with the portfolio Education.

At the recent Historical Keyboard Society of North America Conference which took place from 22-26 June in Hunter New York, Kathryn Cok, Phd was nominated and elected to the position of Vice-President from July 1st by distinguished American and international colleagues.

In deep reinforcement learning, searching and learning techniques are two important components. They can be used independently and in combination to deal with different problems in AI, and have achieved impressive results in game playing and robotics. These results have inspired research into artificial…

Leiden University mourns the victims of the terrorist attacks in Brussels. These attacks are an assault on our democratic society. We will continue to defend our European values of freedom and tolerance against all attempts to undermine them.

A national walkout will be staged on Monday 13 May. Leiden Scholars for Palestine has called on students and staff from Leiden University to meet at 11.00 at the Lipsius building in Leiden and the Wijnhaven building in The Hague.

On Thursday 3rd of March 2016 the 14th Norbert Schmelzer, organized annually by the CDA party, took place in the Hague. This year the lecture was given by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

In 2021 many of our students and staff won fantastic prizes and were awarded important research grants. This is our traditional review of these successes as the end of one year marks the beginning of another.

Should Leiden University cut its ties with the fossil fuel industry forthwith? This was the main question in a debate between students and staff. The answer was clearer for some than for others.

Jeroen Touwen officially joined the Campus The Hague Board on 28 November.

Information about the situation in Ukraine

The MORE project covers the development of the new entrance area for the Leiden Bio Science Park. Partners Leiden University, the Municipality of Leiden and the Amstelveen-based development agency Yisheng signed the agreement on 18 March, marking the official start of the project.

From student exchanges and a joint laboratory to heritage research and a knowledge consortium, the Indonesian Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) is in various respects an important partner for Leiden University.

The editorial board of the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference welcomes several new members. The coming months they will be preparing the journal's second issue, to be published in February 2014.

On Thursday the 30st of June and Friday the 1st of July Vicky Kosta and Vestert Borger participated in the workshop ‘Executive discretion, Public Interests and the Limits of Law’ at the University of Amsterdam. The workshop was organized by Joana Mendes in the context of the research project ‘Unveiling…

The fifth edition of the Owada Chair Symposium, that was held in Leiden on 14 and 15 October 2025, highlighted the law and politics of international criminal justice.

Kees Goudswaard has been appointed as a board member of the GAK Institute on 1 October.

The International Institute of Air and Space Law is very proud to announce that Judge Peter Tomka has accepted the position of chairman of its International Advisory Board. During the Board meeting on 15 November 2017, Judge Tomka officially succeeded Professor Laurens Jan Brinkhorst as chairman of…

Turkish and Syrian students met Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl to discuss how the university can support students who have been affected by the earthquake.

Maarten Feteris, the former president of the Court of Appeal and an alumnus of Leiden University, composed the piece ‘Intermezzo’ to mark the transfer of the rectorate during the Dies Natalis on 8 February 2021.

The greatest challenges facing humanity today have significant global dimensions that require substantial policy responses at a planetary scale. In this context, the Multistakeholder Global Governance (MGG) project aims to understand to what extent and under what circumstances multistakeholder global…

On 2 December, the Municipality of Leiden will apologise for the role previous administrations played in colonialism and slavery. A further study will be carried out.

In January 2020, the team took a break from their respective field sites and travelled back to Leiden to take stock of their research progress and to host its third Advisory Board meeting at their home institution, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden Universit…

The University's childcare centre, de Kattekop, has been awarded the 2017 Regional Award by South Holland. In an independent survey, parents gave the centre an exceptional score of 9.4,.

Leiden has one of the most petrified inner-cities of The Netherlands. This is not beneficial for the biodiversity crisis and Leiden University, with a significant number of buildings within the Singels. The priority should be to make a positive impact on the matter.

In late May 2019, the Food citizens? team traveled to Poland for a project meeting and team outing. This was made possible by the European Research Council’s support and facilitated networks and knowledge-generation.

The Board of Governors of Leiden University has initiated the process of finding a new Vice-Rector Magnificus who will take up the position on 1 August 2016. Executive search agency Van der Kruijs is assisting with the search.

From simulations of galaxies to analyses of MRI scans: scientific research needs more and more computing power. Leiden University is planning to set up a completely new facility for high-performance computing. The green light was given officially on 20 June.

The Executive Board has decided that the classroom scanners (people counters) installed by Leiden University during the coronavirus period at the entrance to buildings and teaching rooms to count how many people are present in an area will be switched off until further notice.

Mariana Gkliati co-organised and chaired on 14 September a PhD Masterclass with the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnès Callamard.

The university is home to many pearls of research institutes that do not make the news every day. The Executive Board visited one such pearl, the Institute of Philosophy, on Tuesday 1 July. It resulted in an inspired conversation.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) comprises several units. Eight Divisions for Sciences develop new research programmes, assess subsidy requests and monitor projects that NWO finances. ALW- Earth and Life Sciences is one of NWO’s eight Divisions for Science. Professor Melly…

A mediation meeting was held today between the University Council and the Executive Board about the appointment procedure for the Vice-Rector of Organisational Development, Erwin Muller. We have managed to resolve the dispute.

On 1 July, Olga Zoutendijk will become a member of the Board of Governors of Leiden University. Zoutendijk (1961) was appointed by the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, and will succeed Mirjam Sijmons. Sijmons is leaving after two periods of membership of the Board of Governors.

Over 30 ambassadors strengthened their ties with researchers and university leaders in a recent visit to Leiden University. Cross-border collaboration (both literal and figurative) was the theme of presentations and a tour of the Hortus botanicus.

Vasiliki Kosta spoke at the conference ‘The role of civil society in the protection of the rule of law’ organised by the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Poland as part of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the EU, which took place on 22 – 23 April.

On 24 May, Iyiola Solanke, Jacques Delors Professor in EU Law at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law and Fellow of Somerville College, gave the annual Europa Lecture organised by the Europa Institute in Leiden Law School's historic Lorentz Lecture Hall. Her lecture was entitled ‘A decolonial approach…

Suzanne van der Pluijm will be appointed Executive Director and Member of the Board of the Faculty of Science with effect from 1 June 2022. She succeeds Ed van den Berg, who has held this position on an interim basis since 1 September 2021 .

Hundreds of students and staff from Leiden University gave a ‘whistle concert’ on 11 December against the planned cuts to higher education. Similar protests were held in other student cities on the same day.

Dr. Stephan Hacker, an assistant professor in the department of Molecular Physiology at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry of Leiden University has been elected secretary of the board of APNet, the Assistant Professor Network Netherlands. Hacker will take a leading role in the young network organisation…