The city of Leiden is home to the oldest universities in Holland.
Leiden University was founded in 1575, and there are many excellent traditions at Leiden University that many younger universities have not had the time to build up. It is a public university with a student body of around 17,000 and has a number of notable memberships including the world famous Coimbra Group of universities.
Nobel laureates at Leiden University
Another claim to fame of Leiden University is that it has been home to four Nobel laureates over the years. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1913, prior to this in 1902 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz had already jointly shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of an important phenomenon known today as the Zeeman effect. Pieter Zeeman, who that effect is named after, was also on staff at Leiden University and therefore the university was able to brag about two Nobel laureates in one year for the same award.
Finally and perhaps best known in general circles was a man named Willem Einthoven. If you’ve taken your history of science classes and remember the material from them, you will probably recognize this name right away. Einthoven was the man responsible for the development of the first EKG device around the turn of the 20th century and two decades later in 1924 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this absolutely pioneering discovery.
Faculties at Leiden University
If there is anything that this list of Nobel laureates illustrates it is that there is a long history of research excellence at Leiden University; a history that many students have been a part of even as early as the second year of their undergraduate career. The university itself is divided up into faculties of Archaeology, Arts, Performing Arts, Law, Medicine, Philosophy, Science, Social Science and Theology and in every single one of those faculties there is internationally renowned research going on. If you want to be a part of a research-intensive university where you can always remain on the cutting edge, then Leiden University is definitely for you.
Address of the University of Leiden
Niels Bohrweg, 2333 CA Leiden Netherlands