A staggering 6.5 billion chicks are killed worldwide every year. These are generally male chicks that are of no economic value. In Ovo has developed technology that can quickly determine the sex of a chick, to ensure that only female chicks are hatched. The first 150,000 chicks have now hatched in this…

The decolonisation war in Indonesia was violent partly because the Dutch military operated on the conviction that ‘an uprising had to be forcibly suppressed.’ This what historian Christiaan Harinck from the KITLV discovered in his PhD research.

With his ice-cold nano force sensor, Tjerk Oosterkamp searches for the boundary between the quantum world and the everyday world. The Leiden physicist has received an NWO subsidy of 600,000 euros.

Have you got an old mobile phone lying around? If so, you can hand it in at Funky Phone in Lipsius. The phone will be recycled and you get to play an old-fashioned arcade game on the Funky Phone games computer built from discarded electronics. Vice-Rector Hester Bijl kicked off the Funky Phone Challenge…

For nearly twenty years the Lorentz Center has been a unique venue where researchers from all over the world work in intense collaboration. In an inspiring academic climate, researchers are free to organise specialised workshops within and across disciplines, be it humanities, social sciences or sci…

Cotton is the most widely used natural fibre for clothes. But how polluting are our jeans and shirts actually? Environmental scientist Laura Scherer coordinated an international research project on the impacts of cotton. ‘The purchases of consumers in Europe can contribute to water scarcity in China…

The field of artificial intelligence has developed rapidly in recent years. We spoke with Stephan Raaijmakers, professor by special appointment in Communicative AI, about the impact of artificial intelligence and why everyone should pay more attention to developments in this field.

Radio telescope LOFAR maps the sky. It produces incredibly detailed images of the universe - and vast amounts of data. Huub Röttgering, director of the Leiden Observatory, talks about the challenges of working with those enormous datasets.

Andreas Häuselmann and Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies wrote an article on the legal and regulatory aspects of emotion data and presented it to the Affective Computing + Intelligent Interaction (ACII ‘23) Conference held at MIT. Andreas Häuselmann also hosted…

In some university restaurants and cafés, you can already order them and, come January, you can enjoy them everywhere: the Pure products. Sustainable, healthy and/or vegetarian. The beautiful lime green, also the colour of the plates and bowls, is the vibrant symbol of these products. And Pure is even…

Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) is an independent institute within the Leiden University Humanities Faculty. A Management Team, consisting of an Academic/Scientific Director, a Director of Education and an Institute Manager, is responsible for the overall running of the institute. This…

PhD defence

In a new video on the Faculty of Humanities' YouTube-channel, we follow MA student Russian and Eurasian Studies Sophie. She is doing an internship at VPRO's OVT, a weekly Dutch radio show that provides historical backgrounds for news, columns and documentaries.

Prof. John Bintliff and Dr. Hans Kamermans have been awarded a 4-year EEC grant to develop Enhanced Reality reconstructions in Classical Archaeology.

America will not be choosing the next President until 8 November. Nonetheless, election fever is already running high. University lecturer and political commentator Kees Boonman explains the phenomenon and shows what Dutch politicians can learn from it.

It is with great regret and sadness that we heard that Prof. Dr. Bernhard Katzy has passed away. We knew that he was seriously ill, but still the message of his passing came as a great shock.

Developing a better treatment for patients with head and neck cancer, that is what Binanox, The 2022 iGEM Leiden team, want to achieve. They hope to raise at least 10,000 euros for this cause. Support their crowdfunding campaign today.

In their quest for materials that conduct electricity without resistance at moderate temperatures, scientists usually work on their chemical make-up. Now Leiden physicists have come up with a radically new approach: pinching holes in a periodic pattern. Publication in SciPost.

An MRI scanner is much more than a machine alone. It is an extremely versatile technique that provides numerous opportunities for finding out more about the workings of the human brain, says Thijs van Osch, Professor of Radiology, with a particular emphasis on experimental cerebrovascular imaging. Inaugural…

How are Dutch universities working together in times of corona, and which solutions are they offering? On 15 May VSNU chairman Pieter Duisenberg presented the e-zine ‘Universities in times of corona’ (LINK) to Ingrid Van Engelshoven, Minister of Education, Culture and Science. The e-zine contains a…

Nature publishes an article on a paradoxical discovery in superconductivity. Physicists are searching for superconductivity at high temperatures so that less cooling is needed in for example MRI machines. News & Views article by Prof. Jan Zaanen in the same issue of August 19th.

The 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize has been awarded jointly to Wessel Kraaij, Alan Smeaton, Paul Over and George Awad for the “TRECVid Video Retrieval Evaluation 2003-2018”.

Marcel Cobussen is professor of Auditory Culture at ACPA. Recently he has published a report (in Dutch) commissioned by the city government of Leiden (NL) on the sonic redesigning of a public space (the Garenmarkt) in Leiden. He is also one of the founders of The Journal of Sonic Studies, an Open Access…

Today, 13 students at Leiden University have started a crowdfunding campaign to collect money for research into the possibilities of growing crops on Mars. Their research will contribute to the knowledge of our galaxy. The project is in the context of the iGEM competition.

The European Parliament is set to vote on the approval of the new Commission, and some Parliament members have already expressed concern over the controversial appointment of Olivér Várhelyi to the role of commissioner. Armin Cuyvers, Professor of European Law, discusses this issue in Dutch financial…

......documentation of the sonic impacts of COVID-19. Many of you have heard the sounds of Wuhan residents chanting “Keep it up, Wuhan!” or Italians singing “Viva la nostra Siena” from their balconies in the evening.

Publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Anthropologist Erik Bähre has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for research on the morality of life insurance.

Technological developments never stop. Machines can already perform many tasks and in the future they will probably take over even more of the work we do. Which jobs could disappear and which will remain in the future? Olaf van Vliet, Professor of Economics at Leiden Law School, commented on these issues…

On 4 April 2024, a meeting of the standing committee of the Dutch House of Representatives was held. At this meeting, Anna Marhold, Assistant Professor at the Grotius Centre and Wim Voermans, Professor of Constitutional Law, informed the committee about the economic and legal implications of a military…

Lecture

The Joan van der Waals colloquium is an ongoing bi-weekly lecture series.

How do I conduct research? How do I structure, conduct and record what I’ve thought of and done? The Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences Programme didn’t just want students to perform a series of tests for the Cellular Biochemistry practical course. After a complete re-vamp - ‘From traditional cookbook lab…

Speech Prosody 2024 includes several poster sessions, the description of which you can find below.

From ‘challenges’ at ministries to reflection sessions where students coach each other. Students, study advisers and other employees shared their best practices regarding labour market preparation at the Employability Working Conference on 24 January.

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…

Leiden University has taken 18th place in the SustainaBul, the sustainability ranking of universities and universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands. A total of 32 institutions took part in this the tenth edition of SustainaBul. Although Leiden University is two places higher than last year,…

Study information

Lecture, Tuesday Talks: Science Insights

PhD defence

Governance and Global Affairs

Conferences, Workshops and Lectures showcasing research and tools in Digital Humanities.

The Around the Rapenburg walk takes you along the canal where Leiden University was founded 450 years ago.

For decades, academic publishing has followed a familiar script: Conduct research → write a paper → submit to a journal → (wait) → peer review → (revise) → maybe get accepted → finally, publish. Yet, this traditional model is increasingly under scrutiny, as several structural issues have become difficult…

The former Volvo director travelled from Sweden to Leiden to give a lecture to the master’s students of the Leiden Leadership Programme. Among other things, Peter Hertinge speaks about the ‘why’ of leadership: ‘You have an important position that affects other people’s lives.’

Different groups of hominins probably learned from one another much earlier than was previously thought, and that knowledge was also distributed much further. A study by archaeologists at Leiden University on the use of fire shows that 400,000 years ago knowledge and skills must already have been exchanged…