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Lynn and Steve are such a sweet couple and extremely SMART.

The story of how they met is so unusual. As part of her doctoral research, Lynn traveled to Stony Brook University in August 2010 to CT scan mouse bones in the Biomedical Engineering Department.  Steve ran the scanner. It was fate. Who could have guessed that a mouse skeleton would bring them together!

Bones, rightly so, are very important to their studies and to their relationship. So it made perfect sense that we started off their engagement portraits in the dinosaur halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Steve was raised on Staten Island, moved uptown for college at Columbia in 1996, then a few blocks further north for graduate school at City College, where he earned a PhD in biomedical engineering in 2008.  After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stony Brook, he became an assistant professor of orthopaedics at Yale Medical School, where he studies osteoporosis.

Lynn was born and raised in Minnesota, moved to NYC to attend Columbia in 2001, and then traveled to Tempe, Arizona, for graduate school in paleoanthropology.  She defended her dissertation in December 2011, and is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at George Washington University in Washington, DC.  She studies bone physiology, and hopes to someday understand how thick-headed people get that way.

The next stop was the beautiful campus of Columbia University just 30 blocks north of the Museum on the Upper West Side.

When Lynn and Steve met she lived in Arizona and he was in New York City–2500 miles apart. Beginning their relationship with so much space between them presented challenges, but as they said it “made them determined to find a way to be on the same side of the country.”

Their mutual love of word games created a way to connect and have some fun together despite the distance. They started playing online Scrabble.

“A personalized crossword puzzle with the appropriate question and a copy of this famous x-ray made up the perfect proposal for two geeky bone physiologists whose relationship flourished in part thanks to a shared love of word games.”

They will be married in New York City this July. Congratulations Lynn and Steve!