Dr. Vern Paxson is a senior scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. He is also a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and an adjunct associate professor in EECS at UC Berkeley.

He is a Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Collaborative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses (CCIED) and other projects that aim to discover and implement ways to defend Internet-networked computers from epidemic-style attacks.