Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I’ve had the deepest pleasure working with all of you during my time as a student at UNC Charlotte, as an officer in the Student Government Association, at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, as the 2007-2008 Charlotte 49er Student Body President and as an engaged citizen in Charlotte.

On July 17th of this year I’ll be making the next major transition in my career, hitting the road across the United States before settling down in Vancouver, British Columbia. After evaluating all my graduate school options I decided that the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is where I want to be. I have enrolled at UBC to work towards my M. Sci.  degree in Materials Engineering. After the first two semesters I intend to petition into the PhD program in Materials Engineering which will keep me in Canada for the next 4-5 years.

I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to work with a great research team on nanotechnology applied to solar cells, to live in the host city of the 2010 Olympics and to be an international student (I’m told that being only 2 hours from Seattle still counts as being an international student).

Additionally, I just got engaged to my girlfriend of several years, Jane Williams and am ecstatic to have her along on my journey as she enrolls at UBC to study Midwifery.

Thanks for making my time in Charlotte so absolutely valuable to my personal and professional development. I’ll try to shoot an email update down towards North Carolina from time to time… if electrically spinning polymers into nanowires isn’t getting in the way.

Sincerely,

Justin Ritchie