Kort præsentation

Research Interests. My research falls within the area of quantum computing. This interdisciplinary research field is formed at the intersection of physics, mathematics, and computer science. As a theoretician, my main goal is to understand for which tasks do quantum technologies hold an advantage over conventional information processing technologies. In other words, what exactly are we going to do with quantum computers that experimentalists and engineers are trying so hard to build?

One theme that permeates much of my research is quantum entanglement. I am interested to identify new applications of entanglement as well as understand its properties from mathematical and complexity-theoretic points of view. For the latter, it is often convenient to use the framework of nonlocal games or Bell inequalities (check out this recent Nobel prize in physics!).

Here are some topics I'm interested to explore with my PhD students and postdocs in the future:

• The development of protocols for verification of quantum devices (self-testing)
• New algorithms for processing quantum data employing Schur-Weyl duality
• Understanding the difference between two mathematical models of entanglement (commuting vs tensor-product model)
• Understanding the complexity landscape of entanglement-assisted distributed protocols (reductions, identification of tractable scenarios)

News

I’m honoured to have received the Silver Medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2025. I am also excited to join the Academy as an elected member in 2026.

Recent Projects

• ERC starting grant for a project  "Quantum Information Processing with Interacting Parties (QInteract)", 2023-2028
• Villum Young Investigator grant for a project "Trustworthy Quantum Technologies", 2021-2026
• PI in QuantERA funded consortium "VERIfication of quantum Technologies, Applications and Systems (VERIqTAS)", 2022-2025
  
  

Publications. See my arXiv page and Google Scholar profile for the most up-to-date record including pre-prints. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I publish in journals on mathematical physics (Commun. Math. Phys., J. Math. Phys.), information theory (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory), combinatorics (J. Combin. Theory), as well as computer science conferences (FOCS, ICALP, CCC).

Selected Publications:

Quantum isomorphism is equivalent to equality of homomorphism counts from planar graphs.
L. Mančinska, D. E. Roberson.
Proc. of FOCS 2020, 661–672, arXiv:1910.06958
Plenary talk QIP 2021.

Constant-sized robust self-tests for states and measurements of unbounded dimension.
L. Mančinska, J. Prakash, C. Schafhauser, arXiv:2103.01729
Presented at QIP 2021. 

Entanglement can increase asymptotic rates of zero-error classical communication over classical channels.
D. Leung, L. Mančinska, W. Matthews, M. Ozols, and A. Roy.
Commun. Math. Phys. 311(1), pp. 97–111 (2012), arXiv:1009.1195
Featured talk at QIP 2011.

Brief CV. 

I joined the University of Copenhagen in 2017 and lead a research group at the QMATH center in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. I received my PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2013, advised by Debbie Leung and Andrew Childs. Before moving to Copenhagen, I held postdoctoral positions in Singapore with Stephanie Wehner and in Bristol with Ashley Montanaro.

I am actively involved in the international quantum information community. For example, I have served on, and chaired, the Steering Committee for QIP, the flagship conference in quantum information and computing theory. I am also the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant. In 2025, I received the Silver Medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and in 2026 I was elected as a member of the Academy.

On a more personal note, my husband, David Roberson, is a graph theorist at DTU. As PhD students, we wrote our first joint paper, which connected graph theory and quantum information. We have three children: Ezra, Freya, and Finn.