Craig Fletcher ’95, DVM, Ph.D.: A&T ‘transformed me’

Craig Fletcher, DVM, Ph.D.

As a high school senior in Long Island, New York, Craig Fletcher ’95, DVM, 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.

“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.

“Members of my family had worked on farms in the islands, but I was a city boy,” he said. “Working at the University Farm was my first time handling animals or filling up a barn with hay. Even so, everyone was always encouraging. My professors would ask me how I had done on a test I’d had. Just the fact that they knew that I’d had a test was amazing to me.”

After A&T, Fletcher earned his DVM 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 of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 2009, Fletcher took the opportunity to come back to North Carolina and join the faculty of 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.”

N.C. A&T alumnus Craig Fletcher, Ph.D., DVM, works with a student in the laboratory portion of the animal science course he is teaching on campus this semester. The class is split between two lab rooms due to COVID-19 restrictions.

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 of 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.

One of the recent discoveries that his lab at UNC-CH helped to facilitate was the development of the antiviral drug remdesivir, which is used to treat the virus that causes COVID-19. Remdesivir was authorized by the FDA under an emergency use declaration, meaning that it has shown effectiveness under some, but not all, circumstances. President Donald Trump, for example, received remdesivir, among other treatments, during his COVID-19 hospital stay in October 2020.

“I’m very proud that UNC had a hand in developing the drug,” Fletcher said. “A&T’s program had a clinical and research bent that set me in this direction.”

This semester, Fletcher has come full circle in A&T’s Department of Animal Sciences. At the department’s invitation, he is teaching a junior-level course in laboratory animal biology and diseases to 36 students online. He also comes to campus to teach the lab to 18 socially distanced students at a time, working with nine students in one lab, then scooting across the hall to work with the other half of the class, then repeating the lab for the next 18 students an hour later.

Although the delivery may be unusual, the curriculum is very familiar.

“This is the class that started me off on my journey,” he said. “Interacting with the students and answering their questions about the career, talking about internship opportunities and helping them learn, is integral because that’s what my professors did for me. Now, I’m trying to help them the same way that I was helped.”

Living through a global pandemic has made learning about animal models and disease, lab animal care and the technology involved all the more relevant, Fletcher said.

Fletcher, who is also a professor and assistant dean in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine, enjoys working with students as his professors worked with him. “I’m trying to help them the same way that I was helped,” he said.

“I’ve been talking to the students about some of the COVID therapeutics and the development of vaccines, and why we have different animal models,” he said. “The students’ eyes are opening. They’re starting to understand why these things are done because they’re so applicable.”

Now that he frequents 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.

“Now, everybody knows about A&T, and I have a lot of pride in that,” he said. “I’ll always sing the praises of N.C. A&T. The faculty’s investment in the students, the family atmosphere – those are a constant. The campus may be bigger than it was, and it may look different, but it’s still changing lives. It certainly did that for me.”