Dr. Blecher is a professor at the University of Houston. He has published more than 80 research papers in his field and has been the recipient of the UH Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship. He serves on the editorial boards of the Houston Journal of Mathematics and the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, and he has also been the recipient of several NSF grants. Dr. Blecher's research interests include Operator Algebras, Operator Spaces, Operator Theory, and Functional Analysis. He is the author of the the following books and monographs:

• Operator algebras and their modules---an operator space approach by David Blecher and Christian Le Merdy, London Mathematical Society Monographs. New Series, 30. Oxford Science Publications. The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. x+387 pp.
• Categories of operator modules (Morita equivalence and projective modules) by David Blecher, Paul Muhly, and Vern Paulsen, Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 143 (2000), no. 681, viii+94 pp.
• The calculus of one-sided M-ideals and multipliers in operator spaces by David Blecher and Vrej Zarikian, Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 179 (2006), no. 842, viii+85 pp

Dr. Bodmann is a professor at the University of Houston. He has been the recipient of grants from NSF and NSERC. His research interests include uncertainty principles in harmonic analysis, the design of frames for the coding of analog signals, wavelet and filter design, and mathematical physics. Selected papers:

• Bernhard G. Bodmann and Peter G. Casazza, The road to equal-norm Parseval frames, J. Funct. Anal. 258, 397-420 (2010).
• Bernhard G. Bodmann, David W. Kribs and Vern I. Paulsen, Decoherence-Insensitive Quantum Communication by Optimal C*-Encoding, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 53, 4738-4749 (2007).
• Bernhard G. Bodmann, Optimal linear transmission by loss-insensitive packet encoding, Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. 22, 274-285, (2007).
• Bernhard G. Bodmann, Manos Papadakis, and Qiyu Sun, An inhomogeneous uncertainty principle for digital low-pass filters, J. Fourier Anal. Appl. 12, 181-211, (2006).
• Bernhard G. Bodmann, A lower bound for the Wehrl entropy of quantum spin with sharp high-spin asymptotics, Commun. Math. Phys. 250, 287-300, (2004).

Dr. Kalantar is an assistant professor at the University of Houston. His research interests include operator algebras, topological quantum groups, noncommutative harmonic analysis, and noncommutative ergodic theory. Selected papers:

• M. Kalantar and M. Kennedy, Boundaries of Reduced C*-algebras of Discrete Groups, J. Reine Angew. Math. (Crelle's Journal), to appear.
• M. Kalantar, M. Neufang and Z.-J. Ruan, Realization of Quantum Group Poisson Boundaries as Crossed Products, Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 46 (2014), no. 6, 1267-1275.
• J. Crann and M. Kalantar, An Uncertainty Principle for Unimodular Quantum Groups , J. Math. Phys. 55 (2014), 081704.
• M. Kalantar, A Limit Theorem for Discrete Quantum Groups, J. Funct. Anal. 265 (2013), no. 3, 469-473.

Dr. Vershynina is an assistant professor at the University of Houston. Her primary research interests lie in the area of quantum information theory. Additionally she does work on quantum computation and quantum many-body physics. Selected papers:

• E. A. Carlen, A. Vershynina, "Recovery map stability for the Data Processing Inequality", arxiv:1710.02409, 2017 (to appear)
• A. Vershynina, "Entanglement rates for bipartite open systems", Physical Review A, 92(2):022311, (2015)
• E. H. Lieb, A. Vershynina, "Upper bound on mixing rates", Quantum Information and Computation, 13(11&12):0986, (2013)
• B. Nachtergaele, A. Vershynina, V. A. Zagrebnov, "Lieb-Robinson bound and the existence of the thermodynamic limit for the class of irreversible dynamics", AMS Contemporary Mathematics, 552:161, (2011)