William L. Fisher is the Leonidas T. Barrow Centennial Chair in Mineral Resources and Professor Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin, in the Department of Geological Sciences. He was the first dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences, which he was instrumental in establishing as well as in securing its substantial endowment.  He was the longest serving director of both the Geology Foundation and the Bureau of Economic Geology. At the Bureau his role as state geologist put him at the forefront of state resource management and national energy policy.