Steve Oliver is Emeritus Professor of Systems Biology at the University of Cambridge and was Director of the Cambridge Centre for Systems Biology. His research involves both experimental and bioinformatics approaches to understanding the workings of the eukaryotic cell.  Steve Oliver led the European team that sequenced the first chromosome, from any organism, yeast chromosome III. He continued to play a major role in the Yeast Genome Sequencing Project, and went on to become Scientific Coordinator of EUROFAN, which pioneered a wide range of approaches to the systematic analysis of gene function using S. cerevisiae. He has exploited genome-wide metabolic models to identify functional modules within the yeast metabolic network and predict epistatic interactions between genes. Steve collaborated with Ross King to develop the Robot Scientist closed-loop machine-learning system for functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation, and re-engineered the genome configuration of yeast to provide a direct test of the chromosomal theory of evolution.