Professor Steve Oliver is Professor of Genomics in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. His research career is distinguished by his pivotal role in the establishment of genomics as a discipline, by his leadership of the yeast genome project, and by his development and championing of functional genomic technologies. He led the international network that allowed a large number of laboratories to contribute to the sequencing of the chromosomes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This tour de force culminated in the sequencing of the first chromosome from any organism in 1992, and then the first entire eukaryotic genome in 1996. Many of the genomic strategies and techniques that we now take for granted, would not be available, were it not for the vision of Steve Oliver