Craig Fletcher, D.V.M., Ph.D.
As a high school senior in Long Island, New York, Craig Fletcher ’95, D.V.M., Ph.D., wasn’t advised to come to N.C. A&T. In fact, he wasn’t advised to go to college anywhere.
“I went to the guidance counselor my senior year, and she looked at me and suggested that I learn to play an instrument or pick up a trade,” Fletcher said.
Instead, Fletcher picked up his game. “I started researching colleges,” he said. “I went on a couple of college tours, and I learned what an HBCU was. I found out about A&T and was attracted to it because of the STEM focus. A&T accepted me and gave me a scholarship.”
Today, Fletcher is an associate vice chancellor for research, professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the School of Medicine, and the director of the Division of Comparative Medicine at UNC Chapel Hill. He is also a veterinarian and a member of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences Advisory Board.
The difference, he said, was the path that A&T set him on and helped him navigate.
Fletcher works with students in the lab at UNC-Chapel Hill. A first-generation college student, Fletcher entered the animal sciences program after a chance meeting with Alfreda Webb, Ph.D. “I’ll always sing the praises of A&T,” he said.
“I probably wouldn’t be doing anything that I’m doing if it weren’t for A&T,” he said. “I went from being an average student to an honors student to the top 10 percent of my vet school class. I became a stronger student not only because the classes at A&T were rigorous, but because of my professors’ mentoring and encouragement.”
A second-generation American citizen – his parents were born in Jamaica – Fletcher encountered many unknowns, but he was eager to investigate all that the college had to offer.
“I didn’t know the college was so big, and had so much going on,” Fletcher said. “I started just looking around.”
One of his exploratory rambles took him inside Webb Hall. There, a chance encounter changed his life.
“I met Dr. Alfreda Webb, and she recruited me,” he said. “I didn’t know who she was or that she was so important – she was so unassuming and grandmotherly. I told her what I was studying but that I didn’t feel inspired, and that I was interested in studying animals. She pulled up some information and told me about laboratory animal science, and changed my major on the spot. I don’t know how she did it, but I left that day as a laboratory animal sciences major. She transformed me that day.”
Fletcher never saw Webb again – already a cancer patient when they met in 1991, she died the next summer – but he later found out that the “grandmotherly” woman was the first of two African American female veterinarians in the nation, instrumental in founding N.C. State’s veterinary school, and the first African American woman in the N.C. General Assembly.
While in the animal sciences program, Fletcher worked on the University Farm with small ruminants and beef cattle. He also worked in the Laboratory Animal Resource Unit (LARU) in the more clinical side of animal science, which eventually became his calling.
After A&T, Fletcher earned his D.V.M. from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, following postdoctoral fellowships in laboratory animal medicine and vascular biology. He then joined the faculty in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 2009, Fletcher took the opportunity to come back to North Carolina and to the faculty in the UNC-CH medical school.
“They knew that I liked North Carolina and that I’d been a student at A&T, so they recruited me,” he said. “They were right – I wanted to come back.”
Fletcher’s particular research interest is in animal models of human disease, discovering and analyzing the ways animal biology and diseases can provide insight into human disease. As the university’s attending veterinarian, he manages the care and housing for the university’s laboratory animals, advises the vice chancellor for research on strategic planning, and works to design new projects and programmatic areas of inquiry.
“A&T’s program had a clinical and research bent that set me in this direction,” he said.
Now that he is a frequent visitor to A&T’s campus, Fletcher notices all that has changed since his graduation, but also the things that haven’t: the university’s supportive nature is still the same.
“I’ll always sing the praises of N.C. A&T,” he said. “The faculty’s investment in the students, the family atmosphere – those are a constant. The campus may be is bigger than it was, and it may look different, but it’s still changing lives. It certainly did that for me.”