Gerald J. Fishman was born in 1943, in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. In 1965 he graduated from The University of Missouri in Columbia with a B.S. Degree with Honors in Physics. From there he obtained his M.S and Ph.D degrees in Space Science from Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1968 and 1970 respectively.

During his time at Rice University, Fishman was part of a research group under Professor Robert Haymes. This group was responsible for balloon borne research of gamma ray emissions, one of the first groups observing gamma ray emitting objects. As a grad student he lead the research team that discovered high energy pulses from the pulsar in the Crab Nebula.

Once out of grad school, FIshman moved to Huntsville Alabama and started working as senior scientist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. In 1974 he became a research scientist at the NASA- Marshall Space Flight Center researching high energy astrophysics. However he soon started an observational research program based around Gamma Ray Bursts. In 1978 be became the Principle Investigator of the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) program, one of the experiments to be placed on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. This satellite launched in 1991, and was purposefully de-orbited and crashed in the year 2000.

This and future research gained Fishman quite a few awards: Three NASA Medals for Outstanding Scientific Achievement (1982, 1991, 1992), the Alan Berman Research Publications Award (1992), the Sigma Xi Research Scientist of the Year, Huntsville (1993), the Bruno Rossi Prize, High Energy Astrophysics Division, the AAS (1994), the Institute for Scientific Information, Highly Cited Scientist (top 1%) (2001), the NASA Exceptional Service Medal (2011) and The Shaw Prize in Astronomy (2011)