Gavin James Wood (born April 1980) is a British programmer who is a co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum. In August 2014 he proposed Solidity, a contract-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts. He is the founder and former CTO and Chairman of Parity Technologies who released the Parity Bitcoin technology stack. He also authored the Polkadot paper.
He was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, graduated from the University of York with a Master of Engineering (MEng) in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 2002, and completed his PhD in Computer Science at York in 2005, with a thesis entitled "Content-based visualisation to aid common navigation of musical audio". The thesis directly lead to the Moodbar, a static music visualisation used in several prominent music applications on the Linux desktop.