Fisher, Celia B.

Early Years

Celia Fisher grew up in the 1950s, on Long Island, where her parents instilled a lifelong love of learning, not only with words but also by example. Her parents pursued higher education in their later years; her mother received her bachelor's degree in her late 30s, and her father, who left high school to fight in World War II, received his bachelor's degree after his retirement at the age of 70. Schooling shaped her life in other ways. Her high school home economics teacher, having decided that Celia was deserving of an A in a class on marriage, also decided she was a good catch for her son. Her future mother-in-law also influenced her choice of a major, human ecology, at Cornell University. After Cornell, Fisher spent a few years as a kindergarten teacher, and returned to the academy to pursue a doctorate under the mentorship of Arien Mack at the New School University, where she was honored with the Alfred J. Marrow Dissertation Award for her investigation of children's visual memory for the orientation of objects (Fisher, 1979). Establishing a pattern of reverse commuting that would keep her base in New York, she completed a postdoc with Mark Bornstein and Charles Gross, at Princeton, where their collaboration produced the first empirical evidence that by 4 months of age, infants distinguish symmetrical from nonsymmetrical forms (Fisher, Ferdinandsen, & Bornstein, 1981). For the last 25 years, Fisher has made her home at Fordham University, in New York City, where she is currently professor of psychology, founder and director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education, and holder of the Marie Ward Doty Chair.

Her husband, Gary, credits Celia's success to her ability to compartmentalize. But the reality is that Fisher was multitasking before computers introduced us to the concept. Throughout her career, the interests she has pursued have been shaped by her roles as daughter, wife, and mother. When her children, Brian and Erica, were young, Fisher was exploring infant visual perception. Her earliest work was in basic developmental science: With empirical methods, she intended to take a “stance against sexist and racist assumptions about human development by generating value-free knowledge” (Fisher, 2000, p. 125). But her experience as a mother led her to emphasize the [Page 468]importance not just of basic science but also of the effect of basic science on research participants, and not just of research questions derived from theory but also those derived from real-world experience. In particular, helping her son Brian and daughter Erica overcome the hurdles of childhood and adolescence and watching her mother bravely and optimistically face the challenges of Parkinson's disease drew her into empirical studies on parent-child relationships across the life span and the ethics of research with vulnerable populations (cf. Fisher, 1993, 2002; Fisher, Higgins-D'Alessandro, Rau, Kuther, & Belanger, 1996; Fisher et al., 2002; Fisher & Johnson, 1990).

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