Scott Fisher

2017 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

Scott Fisher’s long, productive career took him to a number of leading technology companies, and saw him move from research and development to application architecture and development, on to the business application of computing, and, eventually, to IT.

After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Illinois, Fisher landed at the Digital Equipment Corporation, where he contributed to the VAX/VMS operating system, the PDP-11 minicomputer, and the DECsystem line of servers.  Later, Fischer served as Director of Information Technology at Philips NV, Remmele Engineering, and Minco, implementing Enterprise Resource Planning systems at each company.

Most recently, Fisher worked at Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene, and energy technologies and services. He managed the Minnesota company’s IT group supporting its largest sales division. His team developed software to collect data from industrial controllers, and managed chemistry and regulatory data.

In 2015, Fisher returned to CS @ ILLINOIS to serve as an Engineer in Residence. And earlier this year he established the Scott H. and Bonita J. Fisher Endowment, honoring his late wife, Bonnie. This estate gift will fund a professorship in both computer science and mathematics, and will provide funds for the University’s main library and the Grainger Engineering Library.