Micah Fletcher

I joined the IMCM in 2024 as a Bioinformatician. I have a PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology from Princeton University and BS in Biological Sciences from the University of Missouri. I have over 15 years of research in a wide range of fields —  from neuroscience to immunology, behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. Prior to taking this post, I worked at the National Primate Research Center Genomics Core at the Emory University, specializing in the analysis of transcriptomic and multi-modal single cell data for pre-clinical and clinical studies on HIV, heart failure, and other systems.

 Throughout my career, I have been handling and analyzing a broad range of ‘omics datasets – including multi-modal single cell RNA-Seq (RNA, ADT, VDJ), single nucleus RNA-Seq (RNA, ATAC) and spatial RNA-Seq (10X Visium) profiling; differential expression of bulk and pseudobulk RNA-Seq datasets (e.g. case-control, repeated measures); whole-genome/-transcriptome (de novo assembly, annotation, cross-species comparative genomics) and phylogenomic data (UCE probe design, phylogenetic reconstruction, comparative phylogenetic methods) – to support disease studies in humans, non-human primates, and mice, and ecological and evolutionary studies in non-model organisms. While I perform the majority of my bioinformatic coding work using the R programming language, I have experience using MATLAB and Python to operate custom DAQs, write bespoke GUIs, and develop analysis pipelines to collect and analyze image and sound data for behavioral and neuroscience projects. I am also very interested in reproducible research and automation of workflows and apply these approaches where ever can.

My doctoral research focused on the behavioral ecological, genomic, and phylogenetic underpinnings of the evolution of parental care in insects. Ask me about treehopper maternal care sometime for a lovely off-topic natural history chat!