Martin Odersky is a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is best known as the creator of the Scala programming language. Prior to that, he made several contributions to the development of Java. He created the Pizza and GJ languages, designed the original version of generics for Java, and wrote the javac reference compiler.

More generally, Martin is interested in programming languages and methods, in particular how object-oriented and functional programming can be made to work seamlessly together. He believes is that the two paradigms are two sides of the same coin and should be unified as much as possible. He was named an ACM fellow for his achievements in this area.