John Grinder

Former US Army intelligence officer, then a Chomskyan linguist and assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz. He supplied the formal apparatus — transformational grammar — that turned Bandler's knack into something writable down.

Without Grinder there is no Meta-Model, because there is no surface-structure / deep-structure vocabulary to state it in. He later distanced himself from much of the field under the banner of "New Code" NLP.