James Richard Fisher (born December 10, 1943) is an American astronomer.
He joined NRAO in 1972 at the Green Bank, West Virginia site.
He was part of the team that conceived and designed the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope there.
He moved to the Central Development Lab at the Charlottesville NRAO headquarters in 2005, where he retired in 2012 but continues to be active in instrumentation projects.
Along with R. Brent Tully, he proposed the Tully–Fisher relation, a correlation between the luminosity of a galaxy and the width of emission lines in its spectrum.