Fisher received his BA with honors from Grinnell College in 1961 and his PhD in astrogeophysics from University of Colorado in 1965.
He was an assistant professor at University of Hawaii from 1965 to 1971, a staff scientist and then section head at the Sacramento Peak Observatory from 1971 to 1976, and worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research from 1975 to 1991.
He joined NASA in 1991 as the branch chief for the Solar Physics Branch at the Goddard Space Flight Center from 1991 to 1998, was the laboratory chief for the Laboratory for Astrophysics[1] and Solar Physics at Goddard from 1998 to 2002.
[7] He was responsible for the development and launch of the Solar Dynamics Observatory in 2010,[8] which Fisher said "would do for heliophysics what the Hubble Space Telescope has done for astrophysics in general", and the first images from which were widely hailed in the media.
[9][10][11] He was a spokesman for NASA in 2010 when it announced that the sun was entering a cycle of increasingly powerful storms that would peak in 2013.