This Research Opportunities for Women planning grant will support Dr. Herrero in reorienting and reactivating her research program in an area of mathematics that has come to be known as noncommutative algebraic topology. There is a great deal of activity currently in this field, which draws on ideas from functional analysis as well as from geometry and topology. The central thrust is to go from topological spaces to algebras of functions on them and then to more general sorts of algebras, thereby putting the powerful machinery of differential geometry and algebraic topology to work on a greater variety of problems.