Robert Karban is the CTO at Planetary Utilities, a space systems infrastructure provider, and a former Principal Systems Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), specializing in model-based systems engineering (MBSE). With over 30 years of experience, he has led high-impact projects, including developing executable SysML models for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and JPL’s Endurance Lunar Rover mission. His contributions to MBSE have earned him recognition, including two JPL Voyager Awards and INCOSE’s “Achieving the Systems Engineering Vision” award.

As an educator, Robert teaches MBSE and digital engineering courses at Caltech CTME and has trained engineers at NASA, JPL, and industry partners. He co-founded OpenMBEE, an open-source platform for collaborative modeling, and co-chaired the SysML Revision Task Force at the Object Management Group (OMG). A frequent speaker and contributor to the MBSE community, Robert continues to advance systems engineering through innovative modeling and simulation methodologies.

Robert holds a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Technology, Vienna, Austria