Jesse grew up in Alaska, Montana and Minnesota. She is a doctoral student in the History Department at the University of Illinois, studying 19th-century Russian history. She is currently in Siberia doing her dissertation research on conversion to Orthodoxy in Buriatiia, a region on the edge of Lake Baikal and just north of Mongolia. She will be back in the U.S. in August 2009, just in time for the wedding. Jacob was born and raised in Bristol, Tennessee. He studies computer science in the PhD program at the University of Illinois. His research is at the juncture of mathematics and computer science. Specifically, he's a numerical analyst. Jesse, having told someone that she was dating a computer scientist, was once asked, "so what do you guys talk about?" Despite their vastly different professional interests, they have a lot in common. For example, both have an Egyptian papyrus painting of the tree of life. Jesse's is framed and hung in her living room; Jacob's is tacked up in his guest bathroom. They also both visited the Karl Marx museum in the obscure German town of Trier and went to the same Turkish steam bath in Budapest, Hungary, before they even met. Common interests besides Marx and papyrus include a love of travel, literature, hiking and cooking. Pictures from some of their recent adventures are available here at Flickr.