In practice, quantum systems of interest are never isolated. The presence of noise or the interaction with an environment can radically change a system’s dynamics, typically destroying resources such as quantum coherence and entanglement – that is, destroying the resources that are necessary to benefit from quantum phenomena in applications of quantum science.

I will present a general framework to study the dynamics of realistic quantum systems from first principles. More specifically, I will show bounds on the speed with which open-quantum and classical-stochastic systems evolve. In certain regimes, these bounds correctly capture dynamics in a range of fields, from quantum and classical thermodynamics to evolutionary biology.

In the last part of the talk, I will introduce a mechanism to control the dynamics of open quantum systems by exploiting measurement feedback from continuous monitoring. I will show how this can, in turn, be used to mitigate the effects of the interaction with an environment.