Dominique Moïsi, a professor at King’s College London, will be the first holder of the Owada chair. ‘In the present international context of polarisation and divisions within societies and amongst nations, any effort at bringing Asia and Europe closer to each other is truly important.’

Assistant Professor Maarten Schrama works at Leiden University’s living labs, where biology, environmental sciences and knowledge about agriculture and policy come together. We met him at the new Polderlab to ask him about his research.

Following his own path from a young age, taking on challenges, asking for advice and inspiring others with the insights he’d gained: that was Laurent van Vugt’s (1939-2019) path in life. In his will he left a bequest to LUF, which his wife established as a named fund: the Camino Laurent van Vugt Fund.

Military veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder often have symptoms that are both chronic and complex. Professor by Special Appointment Eric Vermetten is looking for new ways to help them deal with these. One possible medicine: party drug MDMA.

Scared to read aloud, put your hand up, answer a question or make a mistake at all: many primary school children suffer from anxiety and their numbers are increasing. Psychologists from the Knowledge Center Anxiety & Stress (KAS) are therefore developing and researching preventive training.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an extraordinary Chinese manuscript at auction in Hong Kong. It concerns an Imperial Edict (dated 1582) from the Ming dynasty period, at one time part of the former collection of well-known sinologist and author of detective-novels Robert van Gulik. The purchase was made possible thanks to a contribution from the Rombouts Fund for Chinese Special Collections, a named fund at LUF, and support from the UBL Friends Foundation.

More than eighty years ago, professor Cleveringa read aloud his now famous protest speech in the Great Auditorium. He denounced the measure taken by the German occupiers of removing all Jewish professors from their posts.