Research Science Affiliate

Richard Fletcher, Ph.D.

Dr. Richard Ribon Fletcher is a member of the research faculty at the Recovery Research Institute and Center for Addiction Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and is also a research scientist at MIT. Dr. Fletcher develops new technologies for use in mental health research and behavior medicine. Dr. Fletcher was an early creator of mHealth systems for Just-in-Time Interventions (US Patent 8,655,441) and developed the MIT Media Lab’s first generation of wireless sensor bands for ambulatory measurement of psychophysiology (now Empatica). Dr. Fletcher currently works on digital phenotyping methods for smart phones, chatbots, and machine learning algorithms to detect affect and predict behavior. Dr. Fletcher is also very active in global health supporting underserved communities.

Dr. Fletcher has undergrad degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT and earned his PhD in Information Technology at the MIT Media Lab. Dr. Fletcher has held previous academic appointments at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (Psychiatry) and Bedford VA hospital, and he is also a military veteran (US Air Force).