Bernard Oliver was, for many years, vice president for research and development at the Hewlett-Packard Corporation and a leading advocate of SETI. Oliver was among the early pioneers to consider in detail the problems of interstellar communication and attended the seminal Green Bank conference (1961). Together with John Billingham, he developed the proposal for Project Cyclops and subsequently became chief of NASA's SETI program in the 1980s, managing the joint teams involved in the High Resolution Microwave Survey at the NASA Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Oliver received a BA in electrical engineering from Stanford University (1935) and PhD from the California Institute of Technology (1940). He joined Hewlett-Packard in 1952 and served as head of R&D there for 25 years. He was also adjunct professor in the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley.