James Richard Fisher (born December 10, 1943) is a scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Charlottesville, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1972 from the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

and his B.S. in Physics in 1965 from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Early Childhood

Rick was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and, at the age of 4, moved with his family to a small farm near Reynoldsville, PA where he attended Sandy Valley Elementary School, West Side Elementary School, and Reynoldsville High School where he graduated in 1961. As a boy he was interested in amateur radio and astronomy which he combined into a career in radio astronomy.

Education and Research

His PhD thesis was supervised by William C. Erickson and concerned the design and prototyping for an array at the Clark Lake Radio Observatory. Much of Fisher's career has involved radio astronomy instrumentation, including telescope feed design, radio frequency interference mitigation, and signal processing. He joined

NRAO The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a federally funded research and development center of the United States National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. for the purpose of radio a ...

in 1972 at the

Green Bank, West Virginia Green Bank is a census-designated place in Pocahontas County in West Virginia's Potomac Highlands inside the Allegheny Mountain Range. Green Bank is located along WV 28. Green Bank is home to the Green Bank Observatory and is also close to the ...

site. He was part of the team that conceived and designed the 100-meter

Green Bank Telescope The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in Green Bank, West Virginia, US is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, surpassing the Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope in Germany. The Green Bank site was part of the National Radi ...

there. He moved to the Central Development Lab at the

Charlottesville Charlottesville, colloquially known as C'ville, is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is the county seat of Albemarle County, which surrounds the city, though the two are separate legal entities. It is named after Queen Ch ...

NRAO headquarters in 2005, where he retired in 2012 but continues to be active in instrumentation projects. In 1978 through 1980 he spent 18 months at the Radiophysics Laboratory of CSIRO in Sydney, Australia, and on the return trip spent 2 months at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India. Along with R. Brent Tully, he proposed the

Tully–Fisher relation In astronomy, the Tully–Fisher relation (TFR) is an empirical relationship between the mass or intrinsic luminosity of a spiral galaxy and its asymptotic rotation velocity or emission line width. It was first published in 1977 by astronomer ...

, a correlation between the luminosity of a galaxy and the width of

emission line A spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum, resulting from emission or absorption of light in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby frequencies. Spectral lines are often used to identi ...

s in its spectrum.''A New Method of Determining Distances to Galaxies'', '' Astronomy and Astrophysics'', Vol. 54, No. 3, February 1977

References

External links

J. Richard Fisher's Homepage

J. Richard Fisher's profile
at the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...

Living people 20th-century American astronomers University of Maryland, College Park alumni 1943 births {{US-astronomer-stub