What are key regulators of plant ageing that can reverse ageing in plants (rejuvenation), and how can we use this knowledge to improve crop plants?

While colloidal aggregates are often undesirable due to their random shapes, we exploit them as a starting point to synthesize patchy particles.

Leiden University is committed to reducing our water consumption.

What is the role of auxin in the initiation and process of somatic embryogenesis?

Do e-waste workers display enhanced effects of adverse health effects due to informal e-waste processing in Nigeria? Is there a difference between the health outcomes of the exposed and the control groups? Are there difference in health effects within and between job groups (collectors, dismantlers,…

Leiden University offers its students a wide range of bachelor's, master's and minors that explore sustainability or climate. Here, you find an overview of those programmes in the academic year 2020-2021.

How do we approach education that facilitates creative confidence for students that leads to innovative solutions to society’s present day and future sustainability challenges? This education research project tackles a sustainability dilemma faced by households in everyday life viz.

Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) is an internationally oriented institute for research and education in biology. We are part of the Faculty of Science at Leiden University.

What is my contribution to the world? This is what students and researchers at Leiden University College The Hague (LUC) ask themselves every day. They want to make a difference with their teaching and research in the four global challenges of ‘Peace and Justice,’ ‘Sustainability,’ ‘Diversity’ and ‘…

Last week Esther Kentin participated in the Second Meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-Ended Expert Group on Marine Litter and Microplastics organized by UN Environment in Geneva.

The new academic year has started and with it education as well. Associate professor Dennis Claessen and Director of Education Han de Winde from the Institute of Biology Leiden devised an environmentally friendly introduction to the Leiden Bio Science Park for their students, with the help of Plastic…

How do you count the nanoplastics in your body? Leiden researchers published a method in Nature Protocols today that should make this easier. Important for both environmental and medicine research.

Leiden's iGEM team has won high honours at the Grand Jamboree in Paris. The biology students came second in the Overgraduate category with their project PHAse Out. They also took home awards for Best Biomanufacturing Project, Best Wiki and Best Entrepreneurship as well as a Gold Medal. To top it all…

Time and again synthesised substances have been shown to pollute the environment more than lab tests predicted. In her inaugural lecture on 16 November, professor of Ecotoxicology Martina Vijver gives a warning for the risks of new, man-made chemical substances and nanomaterials. Various media payed…

Op de dag van de duurzaamheid van 10 oktober startte de 'Billiecup' pre-pilot op de Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid. Aanwezig waren 'plastic soup surfer' Merijn Tinga, Bart Hemmes van het Leiden University Green Office (LUGO) en Esther Kentin, docent bij instituut Metajuridica & projectleider Leiden…

A Leiden Groningen student team has reached the European finals of the BISC-E competition. In this annual competition students have to come up with a sustainable solution to a major social problem. The team invented Suckerspheres: a natural alternative to the plastic microbeads that are still widely…

Canal Cups, Auke-Florian Hiemstra and Liselotte Rambonnet’s project to rid Leiden of disposable plastic cups and its canals of litter, has taken 59th place in Trouw newspaper’s Top 100 sustainable initiatives.

Herman Spaink knows of many substances that may help combat tuberculosis. Lab space to study them safely is very limited in Leiden. A brand-new lab at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia will soon provide a solution. About time, says Spaink, ‘The disease is on the rise and is becoming less sensitive…

On Friday 8 June 2018, Hugo Weiland’s long-standing service was celebrated with a festive lunch organized by board members Ida van Veldhuizen en Hans van Eenennaam.

On Thursday 21 October 2021, the Europa Institute held a hybrid roundtable on the legal feasibility of financing future EU policies – such as EU Green Deal measures – through debts and of thereby extending the novel funding mechanism introduced by Next Generation EU (NGEU). This roundtable was organised…

Leiden University has designed a new Urban Development Plan for the Humanities Campus. This plan incorporates participation from the immediate environment (neighbours and nearby residents). The plan will be available for viewing at the Leiden city council offices from 22 December for six weeks.

How can ‘Big Data’ be used in development and humanitarian aid, and what are the risks? Leiden University and the United Nation’s Global Pulse are organising an international expert meeting in The Hague on 23 October.

A signal that is present both in the centre of our Milky Way and in distant places in the universe could reveal the origin of dark matter. This is what Leiden physicist Alexey Boyarsky concludes in an article in Physical Review Letters.

Publishing an article as early as during your studies. Master's students of Nanne Timmer and Astrid Weyenberg are doing it. In the new course 'Leiden Graduate Journal Culture and Society' they are creating an academic journal.

FactRank is a new online tool that automatically detects ‘checkable’ claims made by politicians in parliamentary debates or tweets, and therefore enables fact-checkers to work much faster. Alexander Pleijter, a researcher and lecturer in Journalism and New Media, helped develop FactRank.

More effective diagnosis and prognosis than ever, with less intrusive medical screening? Scientists from Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam are well on the way to achieving just that. Imaging professors Serge Rombouts and Wiro Niessen are working on an extremely rigorous, self-learning adviser for radiologists.…

An Interdisciplinary project group of the Master Industrial Ecology was awarded a prize for its project “From waste to resource, One chain with shared responsibility”, commissioned by AEB Amsterdam and Waag Society.

Henk Hoekstra and Alessandra Silvestri work on the astronomy and theoretical physics in the Euclid mission. These Dutch researchers are part of the mission.

Life returned to something resembling normal after Covid but other crises soon took its place. These great challenges are also being felt at the University and our researchers are working on solutions. The nitrogen crisis, problems with young people’s services and an increasingly urgent climate crisis:…

Flying is cheaper than driving a car, but a disaster for the environment. Yet few politicians dare to levy excise duty on kerosene. This is only one example from a world where emotions and yelling are burying facts, and in which scientists lose connection with society.

In Leiden University's Vision on Sustainability 2030, biodiversity (biological diversity) is an important focus in its teaching and research and on its campuses.

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

Cryogenic memories, antibiotic treatment for urinary tract infections and recycling plastic sustainably. These are the subjects of the three NWO-XS grants awarded to Leiden Science researchers.

Several media published articles on the latest research from a team including Thijs Bosker, Associate Professor Environmental Sciences, last week. The research has shown that whales in the vicinity of Auckland New Zeeland consume three million microplastics a day.

You can't see them with the naked eye, but they are highly likely to pose a threat to our health: microplastics. These tiny plastic particles are present everywhere in the environment, including within our bodies. On science platform The Conversation molecular biologist Meiru Wang offers valuable insights…

Materials like concrete, steel, plastic and fertiliser shape the world around us, but they’re also extremely polluting. If we want to build a more sustainable society, we can learn a lot from archeologists. How do we relate to these materials? And are there alternatives? Maikel Kuijpers is writing a…

Ava Bauer’s successor has been announced. From September 2023, Nalani Verwoord will be the new assessor of Leiden Science. Nalani is a third-year Biology student.

PhD defence

Anti-litter activist Dirk Groot photographed, tagged, and collected more than 400,000 pieces of litter in the Netherlands. Now, he and his data are included in a study on urban litter by researchers from Leiden University and Andrea Ballatore from Birkbeck, University of London.

It may not seem necessary to install special tap water stations in University buildings, but it is very useful: every tap here also means a tap in a developing country. With the the 35 tap water stations that Leiden University installs, the slum area of Madoya in Nairobi will soon have clean drinking…

Each year the LUF Committee for Academic Expenditure awards grants to research and education projects. These grants for academic talent are often an important step towards grants from NWO and other institutions.

At Orientation Week Leiden, a record 1,378 new international students got to know the city and one another. From a cracking karaoke party to fishing plastic out of the canals – see what they got up to in the photos!

Nederland Circulair! is organising the week of the circular economy, for the second time. This is a great setting for Leiden University to promote several of the university’s circular initiatives. We will kick off with an initiative by alumna Noortje Schrauwen: Raw material beachcombing.

The eight ambitions of Leiden University's vision on education - Learning@LeidenUniversity - were the key theme of the packed Education Festival on 19 June. More than 200 lecturers and students came to PLNT, Leiden's innovation hotspot, for inspiration and best practices in the field of educational…

Gayathri Jaikamur has been awarded by the Dopper Foundation in the Change Make Challenge. She is a student of Masters Biology (Specialisation: Evolution, Conservation and Biodiversity) from India - working under the supervision of CML-researcher Dr. Thijs Bosker (and co-supervision of Dr. Nadja Brun).…

Tropical butterflies adapt to their environment to improve their chances of survival. The changes are triggered by hormone signals that transmit information about temperature to the butterflies' tissues. Biologist Ana Rita Mateus shows how a complex combination of environment, physiology and genetics…

Springer Water series published the conference proceedings of the International Conference on Microplastic Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea.

From 26 to 29 September 2017 the International Conference on Microplastic Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea was held.

Prof. Robbert Dijkgraaf used experiments and models from Leiden University for his tv lecture on symmetry. The lecture was broadcast live on channel 1. He showed that our DNA only twists in one direction using a plastic DNA model and he used a Chladni plate to show the symmetry of sound.

‘De aanpak van microplastics zit vol haken en ogen’