Farmers do not love them all. Microbes can cause tragic consequences for crops. Even the presence of just one pathogenic fungus or bacterium can drastically reduce yields. Still, there are exceptions. In that case, a pathogenic microbe is present in the soil, but does not cause any harm. Adam Ossowicki…

On Thursday 24th of April, Fleur Visser successfully defended her PhD-thesis on social and migratory behaviour of dolphins and whales in the Agnietenkapel at the University of Amsterdam (UVA).

The pesticide thiacloprid turns out to be more harmful than previously thought. It can disrupt the lives of freshwater invertebrates and their communities, upsetting the balance and functioning of entire freshwater ecosystems. This was shown by ecologist Henrik Barmentlo and colleagues, their research…

Why does it turn out to be so complicated to solve sustainability issues if everyone ‘knows’ about these problems? This was the central question in a masterclass on Sustainability for alumni provided by Leiden scientists active in public administration and environmental sciences.

Sustainability challenges don’t just call for environmental scientists – they require expertise from many academic fields. Thijs Bosker and Paul Behrens have made it easier for university lecturers to integrate sustainability into their courses. Their initiative, Local Actions, offers ready-made teaching…

Vanaf september 2025 biedt de Faculteit Governance and Global Affairs de bacheloropleiding Cybersecurity & Cybercrime aan. Deze unieke Nederlandstalige opleiding leidt studenten op tot veelzijdige cyberexperts. ‘Er is veel vraag naar specialisten op het gebied van cybersecurity en cybercrime’.

Soil salinity is affecting large areas in the world and millions of farmers are faced with decreasing yields and many are even forced to migrate . Dutch scientists (Prof Dr. Gerrit van Straten (Wageningen University), Prof. Dr. Peter van Bodegom (Leiden University), Prof. Dr. Jelte Rozema (VU University…

Below we present our past and future events of the Multigreen project

From filtering UV light in sun cream to preventing perspiration odour in socks and sterilising fridges and washing machines. The use of nanoparticles in products is increasing. But what is the impact of these miniscule particles on the environment?

Emeritus Professor Ben Lugtenberg edited a book on “Principles of Plant-Microbe Interactions” together with Paul Hooykaas, Eddy van der Meijden and Jos Raaijmakers, all from the IBL.

Reseachers of the Institute of Environmental Sciences Leiden (CML) have contributed to a debate in the Journal Nature over whether lions in Africa can only be saved with dollars and fences.

Leiden University is a fantastic example of a network university: we create an impact with the city, stakeholders and regional and international partners. The lines of communication are really short and there is a great sense of togetherness. Our good relations with the city have also informed how we…

A special relationship between plants and fungi, which plays an important role in carbon storage in soil, has the potential to slow down climate change. However, the amount of carbon stored in soil is decreasing as a result of human activity. This is what researchers say in a publication in Nature Communications.…

On 24 September the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) in Leiden will launch the new version of the Pesticides Atlas in cooperation with Rijkswaterstaat and Royal HaskoningDHV. The online tool is now faster, more user-friendly, more accessible and all data can be downloaded directly. Users can…

On January 29th, the first annual event of the SUPER MoRRI project will be held in the Lipsius building in Leiden and will be thematically organized around engaging the public with research and innovation. Registration is free; hope to see you there!

Biologist Laura Bertola argues that the traditional separation of lions into African and Asian subspecies is incorrect. She has discovered that Africa is actually home to two subspecies. Her PhD defense was on 18 March 2015.

ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.

The Univerisity of Sharjah organises a conference on February 22-23, 2017 ; Call for papers has started.

Our solar system probably evolved in the same way as most of the other planetary systems around us. This has been shown by German-Austrian-Dutch research on more than 870 planet-forming disks in the Orion cloud A. The five researchers, including three from the Leiden Observatory, published their findings…

Neanderthals at Pech-de-l'Azé I in South Western France had a striking use for manganese dioxide 50,000 years ago.

Leiden researcher Dr Ben Zonneveld has determined the size of the genome - the amount of DNA per nucleus - of wild tulips. His conclusion is that there are more than 87 wild species. Various possibly new species have been discovered.

She left Leiden after her PhD and now, 14 years later, she returns as Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy. Mariska Kriek investigates how galaxies originate and evolve. And she is eagerly awaiting the launch for the new James Webb telescope: ‘The coolest things we are going to find are those we’re…

The Europa Institute has invited Dorjana Bojanovska from Macedonia to visit Leiden Law School to conduct her master thesis research from 6 March - 31 March 2017. Dorjana is a student at the Comparative Constitutional Law program at the Legal Studies Department of the Central European University. The…

Using a clever experiment, PhD candidate Shengxiang Yang discovered how gold electrodes convert water into oxygen. He is the first to unravel the mechanism of this reaction. Yang published his results in the journal ACS Catalysis.

On Wednesday the 23rd of March 2016, Prof. Richard Leakey, the world renowned palaeoanthropologist and conservationist from Kenya and Honorary Member of the LEAD Programme, visited the LEAD Office to contribute to a PhD Workshop.

Explore the One Among Zeroes |0100| project and its role in shaping the future of the digital economy, human-environment dynamics, and urban heritage in Indonesia's cities.

Kirsten Leiss, at the IBL since 2001, is developing new ways of crop protection in order to decrease the use of pesticides: As a model she uses the thrip, a tiny insect which causes economic losses worldwide by silver- and growth damage and virus transmission to vegetables, fruits and flowers.

The SRON space research institute, Leiden University and the TU Delft are appointing six researchers to jointly carry out space research. The research will focus on exoplanets, the evolution of structure in the Universe and technology for developing new pioneering space instruments.

The way that traditional hunter-gatherers roasted tubers can shed new light on how people prepared food in prehistoric times. Archaeologist Stephanie Schnorr has studied the food preparation culture of the Hadza in Tanzania.

The Leiden Observatory was very pleased to welcome eight bachelor’s students from Beijing Normal University at 8 July for the BNU Astronomy Summer School. In two weeks’ time, the Summer School students followed an interactive programme in computational astrophysics. ‘It’s surprising how much you can…

One of our LUCIS members, Karène Sanchez, has been granted the Internationalisation in the Humanities grant for her project 'Engaging Europe in the Arab World: European missionaries and humanitarianism in the Middle East (1850-1970)'. Sanchez is cooperating with researchers from IEG Mainz and IISMM…

How do galaxies form? That is what astronomer Mariska Kriek will be researching in the coming years. She received an NWO Vici grant of 1.5 million euros to study galaxies in the early universe. ‘This research uses new and unprecedented observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These allow…

The National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities programme of NWO enables the building or renovation of research facilities with international allure. Leiden NMR groups take part in the uNMR-NL consortium coordinated by Marc Baldus (Utrecht University) that has been awarded almost 18 million…

Gijs van der Velden has one of the best study results in his first college year of all science studies. With that, he won the Young Talent Incentive award and received 500 euros of the Koninklijke Hollandse Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW). The biology student remains quite nonchalantly. ‘Of course,…

The Palaeolithic period extends from the earliest stone tools (and in Europe, earliest occupation) to the beginning of the current warm period.

All kinds of reasons have been put forward for why plants apparently fail to make maximum use of the available light. None of these reasons can explain why after two billion years of evolution they are not black, like industrial photovoltaic solar cells. Are we missing something?

Leiden Professor of Astronomy Mike Garrett is searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. In his Kaiser lecture on 23 April he will discuss how far science has progressed in this quest.

On 9 and 10 November, the Institute of International and European Law of the University of Göttingen and the Minerva Center for Human Rights of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, organized a conference called ‘Unpacking Economic and Social Rights: International and Comparative Dimensions’.

Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law

As long as we humans have existed, we have told each other stories. But how does a story change each time it is told? Which elements stick and which ones are forgotten? This is what Max van Duijn and Tessa Verhoef will research in their Lowlands Whispers experiment at Lowlands Festival.

A catalyst: normally a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction, without adding molecules to this reaction. Scientists from the group of Prof. Marc Koper of Leiden University and Prof. Yang Shao-Horn of MIT now discovered that in specific reactions that need oxygen, catalysts called metal oxides…

Donald Trump was sworn into his second period as President of the United States on 20 January 2025. Since then, the Trump administration has raised alarms for people around the world who are concerned over what this will mean for the current geopolitical landscape. Join a panel of experts to discuss…

For four years, Vicky Beckers examined thin slices of wood under a microscope, mapping the anatomy of two plant families. Her research helps identify different wood species, benefiting both the timber trade and archaeology.

During orange juice production only around a half of every orange is turned into juice. Lizah van der Aart and Blair Berger, both MSc-students at the IBL, and Ryan Bogaars from Delft University, received an NWO-scholarship to develop a novel method to extract natural products from orange residue.

German mathematician Andreas Greven is the Kloosterman Professor 2020 at the Mathematical Institute in Leiden. He held the Kloosterman Lecture on 6 February and will give three more in-depth lectures in the weeks after that. ‘I’m really looking forward to this month.’

Researchers from Leiden University have developed a method to predict which sellers will be successful in illegal online marketplaces. This could help the police track down big players on the dark web, the hidden part of the internet.

An indian stepwell on a nanoscale. That is what postdoc Nakkiran Arulmozhi calls the pattern he saw when he corroded a special kind of platinum crystal. The unique images show the destructiveness of the process, but also show how predictable it is.

Leiden chemists Marc Koper and Ian McCrum have discovered that the degree to which a metal binds to the oxygen atom of water is decisive for how well the chemical conversion of water to molecular hydrogen takes place. This insight helps to develop better catalysts for the production of sustainable hydrogen,…

Biological chemist Nathaniel Martin and his team received an NWO grant to examine how blocking a specific enzyme in our body, NNMT, could be helpful in the treatment of some cancers. Trials with mice have been promising, and together with the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Martin wants to take the next…

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has awarded dr. Lucien van Beek a Veni grant. This grant offers young researchers the possibility to develop their innovative ideas for a period of three or four years. The awarded research proposal focuses on the Ancient Greek dialects' contribution…