Alexander Nikolaevich Gorban () is a scientist of Russian origin, working in the United Kingdom. He is a professor at the University of Leicester, and director of its Mathematical Modeling Centre. Gorban has contributed to many areas of fundamental and applied science, including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, machine learning and mathematical biology. Gorban is the author of about 20 books and 300 scientific publications. He has founded several scientific schools in the areas of physical and chemical kinetics, dynamical systems theory and artificial neural networks, and is ranked as one of the 1000 most cited researchers of Russian origin. Gorban has supervised 6 habilitations and more than 30 PhD theses. Biography Alexander N. Gorban was born in Omsk on 19 April 1952. His father Nikolai Vasilievich Gorban was a historian and writer exiled to Siberia, and his mother was a literature teacher in Omsk Pedagogical Institute. In 1965-1966 he studied at the Specialized Educational Scientific Center on Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology of Novosibirsk State University (SESC NSU). In 1967, at the age of 15, he entered Novosibirsk State University but was excluded from it in autumn 1969 because of his participation in January 1968 in political student movements against the convictions of Soviet writers Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov. After studying for a year in a vocational technical school and following an individual extramural program at Omsk Pedagogical Institute, he obtained a master's degree with a thesis entitled Sets of removable singularities in Banach spaces and continuous maps under the supervision of Russian mathematician Vladimir B. Melamed. In 1973-1976 he worked in the Omsk Institute Of Transport Engineers and published his first scientific works, but his scientific career could not develop successfully because of his past political record. He had several temporary work places from 1976–1978, each time being compelled to resign, but then moved to Krasnoyarsk where he was permanently employed at the Institute of Computational Modeling. In 1980, Gorban obtained his Candidate of Sciences diploma, corresponding to PhD in the Russian scientific degree hierarchy. His thesis title was Slow relaxations and bifurcations of omega-limit sets of dynamical systems. His viva was organized by Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Mark Krasnosel'skii, and George M. Zaslavsky. With the beginning of Perestroika he became the head of the Laboratory of Non-Equilibrium Systems in 1989 and completed his habilitation in 1990. In 1995 he became the deputy director of the Institute of Computational Modeling