Martin Odersky is professor of computer science at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, co-founder of Typesafe, and creator of the Scala language.

For most of his career Martin has worked on the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming. He believes the two paradigms are two sides of the same coin, to be unified as much as possible.

To support this claim, he has worked on a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Scala. He wrote javac, the compiler used by the majority of today's Java programmers and scalac, the compiler used by the fast-growing Scala community. He authored "Programming in Scala", the best selling book on Scala and pioneered two massive open online courses on functional and reactive programming. Previously, he held positions at IBM Research, Yale University, the University of Karlsruhe and the University of South Australia.