Nicholas Irving Fisher

Nicholas Irving Fisher is an Australian statistician and entrepreneur. He was a statistical researcher at the CSIRO for over 30 years and has founded the analytics company ValueMetrics Australia. He has contributed to the development and applications of directional statistics in geosciences, and statistical methods for quality improvement, specifically performance measurement for enterprises.

Education and career Fisher was born in Melbourne, Australia. He studied at the University of Sydney, where he received his BSc in 1968 and MSc in 1970. He then went to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied under Wassily Hoeffding and obtained his PhD in statistics in 1975. Fisher joined CSIRO in 1969, before he started his PhD, and rose through the ranks over the years until 1997, when he became a chief research scientist. At CSIRO he led the development of the organisation's performance management system. He was awarded a DSc by the University of Sydney in 1994 for his work in directional statistics. He left CSIRO in 2001 to found the analytics research enterprise ValueMetrics Australia and also became a Visiting Professor of Statistics at the University of Sydney. He is professionally accredited by the Statistical Society of Australia and by the American Statistical Association.

Honors and awards Fisher became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1991 and an Honorary Life Member of the Statistical Society of Australia in 1997. He received the service award from the International Statistical Institute in 2015. He was named the W. Edwards Deming Lecturer by the American Statistical Association in 2019. Fisher was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 2025.