“I come from a family of educators. My grandmother, Dame Kāterina Mataira, received her knighthood for saving Te Reo Māori from extinction after a century of colonisation. If she could do that, what is the measure of what you can do in a single life? For our generation – for my life – that challenge is climate change and the future of human prosperity. Fusion itself is only a technical solution, but these problems are more than technical. Saving Te Reo Māori wasn’t done via an app, AI, or government intervention – it was done by people coming together with a sense of responsibility, courage, and hope to protect what was most important to them. That’s OpenStar, and that’s me.”

Ratu Mataira completed his PhD in Applied Superconductivity, specialising in No-Insulation HTS Coils and Superconducting Power Supply Technologies. By the end of his PhD he had set the bar as the most prodigious student to graduate Robinson Research Institute, the world leader in such technologies. Ratu’s academic success and commercial networks resulted in multiple offers to take up CEO roles in New Zealand Start-ups, but ambition leads the way, and if we have a shot at making fusion work, that’s where you’ll find Ratu.

"My journey has always been about seeking and conquering the most challenging tasks. Initially, the deep and winding paths of theoretical physics seemed like a logical starting point. The realm of traversable wormholes and esoteric spacetimes is both beautiful and absolutely complex. However, this world did not meet my threshold for making positive impacts here on Earth. The combination of beauty and necessity is rare, and rarer still is finding such a potent form as the levitated dipole. This was always where I was destined to end up.”
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You might think this sounds too convenient. A theoretical physicist who speed-ran general relativity, publishing over 20 papers and championing a spacetime geometry before graduating with his PhD? A fusion of scientist and innovator who dreams of warp-drives and crunches budgets in the same sitting just turns up with an unshakeable focus on giving the levitated dipole its rightful shot?
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Well you’re right. This whole backstory is a cover up –Al is actually a time traveller from the future. Through one of his traversable wormholes he has come to ensure we achieve viable fusion, and he knows something we don’t; it’s only a matter of time.

“Since I was very young I have been sailing, and navigating by the stars. Growing up in 1970s United States, sailing to Europe, and living in the Middle East, I came to appreciate and understand the importance of fusion energy, not only as the ultimate source of energy in our world, but also as a hope for the future of our planet.

I grew up, and had the chance to study traditional magnetic fusion in tokamak plasmas, and then take the dipole concept from an observation of plasma above us in space to a real, working plasma confinement device down here on Earth. Now, at OpenStar in New Zealand, a land twice found by peoples navigating by the stars, I have landed with a great team of kindred spirits for another shot at bringing the power of the stars to Earth.”

Darren was the chief experimentalist at the Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX) - the single greatest source of real-world knowledge on the levitated dipole concept. In his time at MIT and Columbia, he has published over 200 papers on fusion energy. He contributed to the early stage design of SPARC, designed and ran the first experiment to observe h-mode at Alcator C-Mod. He is an exited founder of Cambridge Physics Outlet and the co-inventor of the SPARC runaway electron mitigation coil. The importance of having Darren here as our Director of Plasma can really not be overstated.