Gavin Wood
Gavin James Wood is a computer scientist, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot and Kusama. Before Ethereum Wood worked at Mircrosoft.
Ethereum
Gavin Wood is one of the founders of Ethereum, along with with Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin. He describes it as "one computer for the entire planet". He proposed and developed Solidity, the programing language the smart contracts are written in. In 2014 he released a paper defining the Ethereum Virtual Machine. He served as Ethereum Foundation's first CTO, which he left in 2016.
Other
Wood founded Parity Technologies (formerly Ethcore) with Jutta Steiner. He held the title of chief web officer at Parity in 2018.
Web3 Foundation
Wood founded the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit organization focusing on decentralised internet infrastructure and technology, starting with the Polkadot network.
Polkadot uses proof of stake mechanism and allows developers to create their own blockchain that can talk to other ledgers, forming a system of parachains. Developers can decide what kind of transaction fees to charge and how fast to confirm blocks of transactions across the digital ledgers. In 2019, he founded Kusama, an early stage experimental development environment for Polkadot.