You may be familiar with electrons, protons, and neutrons…but have you met a Gorbon?
Dr. Matthew Gorban, actually spelled with an “a,” is a quantum physicist specializing in warp drives, wormholes, and the quantum vacuum. Most importantly, he is the mastermind behind some of Rhea Space Activity’s (RSA) creative, blue sky ideas.
His remarkable journey from biomedical engineering to quantum physics is nothing short of a rip in the fabric of spacetime. The Gorbon is a superposition of creativity and scientific acumen that drive innovation in unexpected ways.
Dr. Gorban presents on the Casimir Effect as a graduate student at Baylor University.
Big Bang
Before his eigenstate collapsed, Dr. Gorban had a keen understanding of physics principles long before he imagined a career as a physicist.
“I was always interested in engineering-related toys like K’NEX and Legos,” he said. “I even made a zipline harness for my stuffed animals that went from our second-story balcony down to our pool.”
Dr. Gorban playing with Legos as a child.
As time evolved, Dr. Gorban tunneled through wikipedia wormholes, interacting with topics such as particle physics and advanced space propulsion.
“I thought, this stuff is really cool, but who actually does this? You’d have to be a genius,” he observed.
His parent particle, a pharmacist, accelerated him toward a career in biomedical engineering and drug development. He secured a Dean’s Honor scholarship at Tulane University with a creative video submission demonstrating how altering molecular structures could lead to the development of entirely different drugs.
Dr. Gorban's scholarship video submission.
However, once at Tulane, an engineering physics class and volunteering in a lab diffracted the course of his career. He switched his major from biomedical engineering to engineering physics during his freshman year.
“I realized I didn’t like biology very much and I wanted to do more math,” he said. “I took an engineering physics class, and that’s when I decided to focus on physics.”
Inflationary Period
Dr. Gorban attributes his success to making his own luck, but it's clear that his hard work and dedication have been the driving force behind his achievements.
“My freshman year, I knew that I wanted to get in a lab and do work,” he said. “I reached out to Professor Dr. Jiang Wei who runs the quantum material and nanodevice laboratory and started working in his lab the second semester of my freshman year.”
Consequently, Dr. Gorban’s work focused on understanding the metal-insulator phase transition of vanadium dioxide, using pulsed laser deposition to grow VO2 thin films and characterizing their surface structures and electro-optical properties.
“I designed my own analysis tool where I was able to use probes to look at how the surface conductivity changes with temperature,” he said. “I used a bunch of different machines to grow stuff. I designed and made a chemical vapor deposition system to grow VO2 nanowires.”
Dr. Gorban’s exponential growth period continued. At the start of his junior year, he worked with a team to submit a project to the NASA BIG Idea Challenge.
Dr. Gorban with the 2017 NASA Challenge Team Winners from Tulane.
“We had to design a solar-electric powered space tugboat system, but we were not aerospace engineers, so we had to come up with something really creative,” he said. “If you look at the design we submitted, it’s this massive hexagonal structure composed of different modules connected to one another, each having their own propulsion system and control unit, that would then coalescence in space using LIDAR technology and an electromagnetic holding force for close alignment.”
His team’s innovative idea would go on to win the challenge that year.
Dr. Gorban then launched into an internship working on an ISS experiment at NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio. There he was the lead test engineer for the Flow Boiling and Condensation Experiment (FBCE), which arrived at the ISS in 2021.
While at NASA, he continued to pursue his interest in physics and space propulsion.
“I was interested in advanced propulsion and the Casimir effect,” he said. “It’s my favorite physical phenomenon. The idea that the quantum vacuum can push macroscopic objects and create negative energy still blows my mind.”
He continued to make his own luck during his internship.
Matt-er Dominated Era
“I had been reading this book called Frontiers of Propulsion Science, and reached out to one of the authors, Mark Millis, who happened to be at Glenn Research Center at the time.”
Dr. Gorban during his internship at NASA Glenn Research Center.
Millis connected Dr. Gorban with Dr. Gerald Cleaver at Baylor University, who was working on warp drive, wormhole and Casimir effect research. After completing his bachelor’s in engineering physics at Tulane, Matt would begin his phase transition into Dr. Gorban at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Starting with low delta-V, The Gorbon had to initiate a gravitational slingshot to keep pace with the Physics program at Baylor.
“I hadn’t taken a lot of the physics classes other people had taken during undergrad, so I had to teach myself graduate level physics to catch up,” he said. “The first year and a half were the hardest academic years of my life.”
Dr. Gorban and his fiance Nicole at a Baylor football game.
During graduate school, he began working on warped spacetimes, gaining experience calculating exotic spacetime geometries of warp drives and wormholes. As causality of graduate school progressed, he continued on his geodesic path to studying quantum vacuum interactions and advancing Casimir effect research. Simultaneously, he re-wrote the university’s Intro Physics lab while teaching them.
Dr. Gorban successfully defended his dissertation titled “Investigation of the Asymmetric Dynamical Casimir Effect” in February 2024, earning his PhD in Physics.
After graduation, he adjusted course from university life to living in a big city and working in industry.
“I had a lot of friends from Tulane that lived in DC and my parents are in Richmond, so I started looking there,” he said. “I always thought working for a startup sounded interesting so I looked up the best space startups in DC.”
That’s how he discovered Rhea Space Activity.
Local Equilibrium
Now at his saddle point, Dr. Gorban is now fully assimilated into the RSA team.
“In graduate school you really have one focus,” he said. “Here, I get to work on different projects, which I really appreciate. I’m also doing business development and Congressional outreach. It’s really fun to be able to contribute to all of the different business sides of science.”
Dr. Gorban on Capitol Hill doing Congressional outreach for RSA.
Outside of RSA, Dr. Gorban is also an Assistant Research Professor at Baylor University in the Early Universe Cosmology and Strings division of the Physics department.
When he’s not immersed in teaching or his work, he’s propagating through space and time.
“I never had an opportunity to study abroad so after I finished my bachelor’s, some friends and I spent two months exploring Europe and Southeast Asia,” he said. “Learning about other cultures really opens your mind. I am a better listener because of that experience, and I'm looking forward to experiencing more new places.”
Dr. Gorban and his college friends in Vietnam.
What he’s most looking forward to at RSA is being part of sending something into space in 2026.
“There’s something incredibly fulfilling about knowing that your work will be part of a mission that reaches beyond our planet,” Dr. Gorban said.
The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.
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