I’m Vince Buffalo, a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling at the Gates Foundation, where I work on computational epidemiology, infectious disease modeling, and scientific software.

My path here was circuitous: I started in economics, political science, and statistics, got pulled into bioinformatics, landed in population genetics, and eventually fell in love with epidemiological modeling. Along the way I wrote an O’Reilly book (Bioinformatics Data Skills ), did a PhD with Graham Coop at UC Davis studying linked selection and the structure of genetic variation, and postdocs with Andrew Kern at the University of Oregon and Rasmus Nielsen at UC Berkeley.

I build models and tools for decision-making under uncertainty. These days I think a lot about decision theory and the value of information in global health, infectious disease modeling, stochastic processes, causal reasoning in simulation models, and how to build correct scientific software. I’m especially drawn to functional programming and types (lately OCaml in particular, but Rust was my gateway language) as tools for thinking clearly about rigorous data modeling.

A lot of my work sits at the boundary between modeling, inference, and scientific software design — getting the abstractions and architecture right upstream saves enormous confusion downstream, whether you’re building an epidemiological model or reasoning through whether to place a bet (really the same thing !). I still think about evolutionary genetics — linked selection, and why genetic diversity looks the way it does.

Why the λ in the logo? It’s a thread through many of my interests: hazard rates in epi, the lambda calculus that underpins functional programming, eigenvalues, coalescent rates.

Contact

You can email me at . You can also find me on X and GitHub .

Positions

Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Disease Modeling, Gates Foundation, 2025–present
Postdoctoral Scholar, Nielsen Lab, UC Berkeley, 2022–2024
Postdoctoral Scholar, Kern and Ralph Labs, University of Oregon, 2019–2022
Staff Computational Biologist, Ross-Ibarra Lab, UC Davis, 2013–2014
Bioinformatician, Dubcovsky Lab, UC Davis, 2012–2013
Lead Statistical Programmer, Bioinformatics Core, UC Davis Genome Center, 2009–2012

Education

Ph.D. in Population Biology, UC Davis (with Graham Coop), 2019
B.A. in Economics and Political Science (minor in Statistics), UC Davis, 2009