Jessie and James have two very different accounts of when they first met. For James it was summer of 2012 and for Jessie it was summer of 2013...

James: I remember a Du Bois Chemistry group summer BBQ at a beach in Santa Cruz, CA. I met a lovely, interesting, beautiful, athletic girl named Jessie Hammes. She swam backstroke just like I did in high school (but she was a little bit faster)! We were both happily in relationships at the time, but I remembered her bright personality and her name. Fast forward one year... I tracked her down on Facebook and invited her out to lunch. She took weeks to respond but eventually took me up on my offer. We met at the Clark Center cafe at Stanford Hospital because my lab was just across the street. We talked and laughed and got along great. I ran into a friend at the end of lunch and told him, "This one might be different". Turns out I was right...

Jessie: The summer I graduated from college, I was at my parent's house in Lake Geneva, WI when I noticed a Facebook message in my inbox from a guy I didn't recognize, asking me out on a date. I decided he was cute and that I should give it a shot, so we set a date for the next week when I was back in California. I remember seeing him outside the Clark Center and awkwardly shaking his hand when we met (turns out he was going in for a hug, since we'd met before?). I spent the first half of lunch trying to figure out if he actually had an accent and where he might be from. There was an immediate spark and I remember never wanting lunch to end. After we went our separate ways I have a very vivid memory of walking back to my car and just thinking, wow! I was nervous though because when we parted ways he said, "Be in touch." and I spent the next few hours analyzing what exactly that meant. Turns out, "Be in touch" means texting me later that evening, asking me out on another date the following night...

Jessie was born in California on March 30,1991 to Greg and Debbie Hammes, and was raised in Carmel, Indiana. As a competitive swimmer all through high school, Jessie set her sights back to California for college and attended Stanford University where she majored in Human Biology and swam on the varsity swim team. After graduation, she spent 2 years coaching a club swim team before packing up and moving to Madison, Wisconsin for medical school at the University of Wisconsin. She plans to graduate in May of 2019.

James was born on June 26, 1987 in Brisbane, Australia to Ian and Colleen Walker. He has an older brother, Mitchell, and a younger sister, Stephanie. James attended Grace Lutheran College and then Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane where he majored in Chemistry. After a lifetime in beautiful Australia, James made the decision to move to the US in 2008 for his PhD in Organic Chemistry from Stanford University. He graduated in the spring of 2014 and began working at Flexus Biosciences in the California Bay Area. In April 2016, equipped with the most intense snow gear one can buy in California, James made the move to Madison to be with Jessie. He recently began work at Sigma Aldrich, where he works in drug development.