In computational biology, he is known for his work on reconstructing phylogenetic trees[21] based on Buneman graphs, which are named in his honour.
Buneman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to data systems and computing.
[22] His nomination for the Royal Society readsPeter Buneman is distinguished for his advances in uniting programming languages and databases.
On the application side, he used these techniques to demonstrate that – contrary to an assertion by the US Department of Energy – queries on existing non-relational genomic databases could be directly evaluated; fruitful collaboration with biologists ensued.
Already, with Khanna et al. he has built an efficient archiving system for scientific databases; more fundamentally, he seeks a formal basis for tracing provenance.