Richard Ribón Fletcher

Research Scientist · MIT · company speakers →

Rich Fletcher began his work on radio-frequency interrogation of materials as an undergrad researcher at MIT, building portable electronics for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), while pursuing dual undergraduate degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and completing his undergrad thesis work on electromagnetic simulations for the MIT Bates linear particle accelerator. Rich Fletcher was a graduate student in Physics at UC Santa Barbara and worked at superconductor company STI, while awaiting the start of his military service. Rich Fletcher worked for five years as a research scientist at the US Air Force Materials Laboratory, Electromagnetic Materials Division, where he made thin film high-temperature superconductors and designed and fabricated passive microwave filters and ultra-high-Q microwave resonators. At that time, Dr. Fletcher also participated in the government working group that allocated RF frequencies for the new emerging field of RFID. With this experience, he was recruited by Prof Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, to lead the development of low-cost RFID tags and RFID sensors using smart materials. Rich Fletcher’s began his academic chipless RFID work in 1994 with sponsor Proctor and Gamble and Kevin Ashton, who later joined MIT as executive director of the MIT Auto-ID Center and also coined the term "Internet of Things." During his 8 years as a graduate student, Rich Fletcher filed more than 10 patents on chipless RFID and presented oral papers at IEEE Magnetics Society , Materials Research Society , and IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society meetings. In 1996, he presented Chipless RFID at the first IEEE Auto-ID Conference , which was the pre-cursor to the current IEEE RFID conference. After graduation, Rich Fletcher founded the RFID consulting company, TagSense, Inc. , to design new types of chipless and chip-based RFID sensors, and to create new patented RFID technologies for industry and government sponsors, including Motorola, Becton-Dickinson, 3M, MasterCard, and NASA. Over the years, Dr. Fletcher worked on a wide variety of unpublished and confidential projects, including the RFID reader for the world’s first all-printed RFID tag (with Kovio ), first-generation RFID readers for contactless payments (with MasterCard) and the world’s smallest EPC Gen2 UHF RFID Reader (the original "Nano-UHF TM "), which was part of the first EPC Gen2 mobile phone in 2006 (with Nokia ). A spin-off company from TagSense , FreshTemp , was acquired by IoT company Digi in 2016 for cold-chain and food safety monitoring. In 2015, Dr. Fletcher re-joined MIT full-time as a Research Scientist, and founded a research lab at MIT called the Mobile Technology Lab , focusing on developing IoT systems for health and environmental sensing. With Prof. Roz Picard at MIT, Dr. Fletcher designed and patented early wearable electronic sensors and AI-driven mobile health interventions, which was later commercialized as a company, Empatica . Over the past decade, Dr. Fletcher and his group at MIT have expanded the field of RFID to include multi-modal sensing, including multi-spectral light and sound, and expanded the use of these signals to probe living biological systems, including plants, animals, and humans, to perform neuromodulation, with applications for improvement of brain health, human performance, and sleep. Dr. Fletcher’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, Vodafone, the Tata Trust, and the NASA SBIR program.

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