[1] 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.

[3] 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.

[5] 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.

[6] On account of the presence of his friend, Mike Lerner, he chose to enroll in the Department of Bacteriology of the University of California, Berkeley, but he found himself uninterested by the phage research done under A.P.

[5] During his time at UCLA, he attended the famous summer course taught by C. B. van Niel at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.

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.

[5] Along with his wife Germaine, he accepted the invitation of Élie Wollman to take over the former lab space of François Jacob and Jacques Monod, with the stipulation that he be allowed to work on cyanobacteria exclusively.

[11] Together with C. B. van Niel, Stanier was described by Carl Woese as one of the "only consistently insightful and articulate reporters of the early search for a microbial phylogeny".

[13] Stanier's work on Cyanobacteria focused on obligate autotrophy, fatty acid composition, structure of phycobiliproteins and phycobilisomes, chromatic adaptation, nitrogen fixation, and their nutrition and taxonomy.