Our own Research Distinguished Professor Terry Loring, Postdoc Lara Ismert,  and SNL Researcher and Adjunct UNM Research Professor Alex Cerjan, organized  an international workshop that was held in Albuquerque on March 11-14, 2026. The conference brought together  both mathematicians and physicists and those in-between. A specific focus was on local topology in aperiodic systems, but more generally they looked at topics in C*-algebras expected to be of utility in the study of quantum materials.

The Workshop on Noncommutative Topology and Quantum Materials was invitation only, a former UNM undergraduate student Dominic Cordova and a current UNM graduate student Jose García where among the invited participants, as well as Prof. Jeff Boersema from Seattle University, who spent a sabbatical year at UNM in 2014. There were 26 participants, from US  universities and national labs  (UNM, SNL, LANL, UC Colorado Springs, CALTECH, Seattle University, MIT, Purdue University, Michigan State University, Yeshiva University, University of Missouri-Saint Louis,  University of Minnesota), and from international institutions  (Royal Institute of Technology KTH and  Uppsala University in Sweeden,  Donostia International Physics Center in Bilbao, Spain; St John's College, Cambridge, UK; University of British Columbia, Canada).

The conference received primary support from the US Army Research Office, and was partially supported by the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories, and by  the UNM Department of Mathematics & Statistics and the Gus Adam Efroymson memorial fund at UNM.

The organizers are grateful for the help provided by our Academic Coordinator Megan McKay.