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Roger Yate Stanier (22 October 1916 – 29 January 1982) was a Canadian microbiologist who was influential in the development of modern microbiology. As a member of the Delft School and former student of C. B. van Niel, he made important contributions to the taxonomy of bacteria, including the classification of blue-green algae as cyanobacteria. In 1957, he and co-authors wrote The Microbial World, an influential microbiology textbook which was published in five editions over three decades. In the course of 24 years at the University of California, Berkeley he reached the rank of professor and served as chair of the Department of Bacteriology before leaving for the Pasteur Institute in 1971. He received several awards over the course of his career, including the Leeuwenhoek Medal. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences and the Légion d’Honneur.
His early education was at private boarding schools. Beginning at age 7 he attended St. Christopher's School in Victoria, British Columbia for two years, followed by what Stanier described as "five long and hellish years" at Shawnigan Lake School. His father removed him from Shawnigan after he contracted pneumonia, upon his recovery he attended Oak Bay High School until his graduation in 1931 at the age of 15. He then enrolled at the local junior college, Victoria College, where he studied biology, literature, and history. He subsequently transferred to the University of British Columbia (UBC) with the intention to study literature and history. His parents demurred, however, so he settled on bacteriology in order to placate his physician father, ultimately graduating with first-class Honours in bacteriology in 1936.
Because he felt he had had insufficient exposure to the physical sciences at UBC he sought chemistry training at the University of Munich in 1936. The rise of Nazism had poisoned the environment at the university, so he cut short his studies there and decided to attend graduate school in the United States.
After his graduation he worked with Marjory Stephenson at the University of Cambridge as a Guggenheim fellow beginning in 1945.
In 1946-1947 we had at Indiana Roger Stanier, a marvelous teacher of bacterial biochemistry, a superb lecturer, and an arrogant uncompromising intellectual. Roger was from British Columbia, but English in spirit, an though vocally anti-puritan, emotionally a knot of puritan revolts and inhibitions — a delightfully neurotic man. As in Dante’s Inferno Farinata was contemptuous of Hell, so did Roger hold all of Indiana in contempt. From him I began to learn that biochemistry was not just chemistry, but biology. I learned about the power of an integrated view of metabolism and of the subtle interplay between organisms and their environment. Most important, I learned that bacteriology could be as much fun as genetics, if of a different kind of fun.Salvador Luria (1984) A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube: an autobiography, page 127, Harper & Row
In 1947 he accepted an invitation to join the Department of Bacteriology of the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for most of his career.
Stanier's work on Cyanobacteria focused on obligate autotrophy, fatty acid composition, structure of and , chromatic adaptation, nitrogen fixation, and their nutrition and taxonomy. He led the proposal to include cyanobacteria, which he called blue-green algae or cyanophytes, within the bacteria rather than consider the cyanobacteria as distinct from bacteria.
Stanier also authored an influential textbook, The Microbial World. The Microbial World played an important role in the promulgation of the concepts of "prokaryote" and "eukaryote" as negative definitions of Bacteria and Archea.
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