Raise your beaker in a Valentine’s Day toast and say, “Awww.” There are sweet love stories afoot in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
In a department of nearly 30 faculty members, there are three married couples. According to our calculations, that means about 20 percent of the department is married to someone in the department. Also of note: Two other CHE faculty members have spouses who work elsewhere at the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.
So what gives? Something in the lab water? Pheromones brewing in the beakers?
The origin stories for the CHE married couples start far away from the University of Florida. Assistant Professor Sumant S. Patankar, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor Janani Sampath, Ph.D., for example, met at Ohio State University when they were Ph.D. students.
“I first noticed Janani when she walked into a Graduate Seminar classroom, looked around and left because the room was full,” Patankar said. “We later met more formally at the OSU Chemical Engineering Department awards banquet, where we happened to share a table for dinner.”
Asked about a “wow moment” — that eye-lock millisecond with hints of destiny — Sampath said: “For me, there has never been one grand romantic gesture. Instead, it is Janani’s constant love, support and sacrifices for me and our family that I value most.”
Cue the “Awwws.”
“Our career choices after graduation required us to spend a couple of years in a long-distance relationship,” he continued. “When the opportunity arose for us to be together at the University of Florida, it was simply too good to pass up.”
“For me, Sumant moving from Portland to Gainesville, giving up his dream job at Intel so that I can pursue my dream of being a tenure-track faculty, is always something I will be grateful for,” Sampath added.
And then there are assistant professors Yeongseon Jang, Ph.D., and Won Tae Choi, Ph.D., who — as many people do — grew closer while working on small-angle neutron scattering experiments to understand nanostructures in polymer thin films.
“These experiments often required overnight stays at national laboratories, which naturally gave us many opportunities to work side by side, talk deeply about science and share our professional dreams,” Jang said.
The couple met while studying at Seoul National University in the Polymer Thin Film Physics Laboratory.
“Due to Korea’s mandatory military service for men, Won Tae joined the lab later as a master’s student, while I was already a Ph.D. student,” Jang said. “When Won Tae decided to pursue his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech, we became engaged and spent two years apart until I completed my Ph.D. and joined Georgia Tech as a postdoctoral researcher.”
Jason Weaver, Ph.D., and Helena Hagelin-Weaver, Ph.D., met at Stanford University when he was a Ph.D. student in chemical engineering and she was visiting Stanford as an exchange Ph.D. student in chemistry from Stockholm.
“In 1996, she spent the day shadowing me in my lab to learn about my research,” Weaver recalled. “I then met her again in 1998, during her second visit to Stanford. We realized we were a couple nearly immediately after meeting again in 1998.”
“Our first date,” Hagelin-Weaver added, “was the celebration of Jason’s graduation (Ph.D. from Stanford). We knew then that the ‘chemistry’ was right. After that, we had to work out some details, as I had to go back to Sweden to finish my Ph.D., and Jason got a position at UF. We quickly got tired of being thousands of miles apart.”
How is it working together?
“Being in the same field is great, as we can discuss research details at a level that would not be possible otherwise,” Hagelin-Weaver said.
Her husband agreed: “We work in related areas (catalysis) and share grants together; there have been several over the years. We do talk about research at home as well as school, but it doesn’t dominate. We talk about our kids.”
“We are able to support each other effectively in our daily work,” Patankar noted. “Having many other married couples in the department has also helped us feel more relaxed and supported.”
Being engineers, conversations often come back to solving problems.
“We still talk about science every day and genuinely enjoy tackling interesting problems together,” Jang said. “For example, we developed a collaborative research direction that combines our expertise in electrochemical engineering and interface engineering to enhance the electrocatalytic activity of electrochemically active bacteria at conjugated polymer interfaces.”
CHE Chair Rich Dickinson noted that while married couples serving within the same chemical engineering department have historically been rare, the growing representation of women among engineering faculty makes such pairings increasingly likely. He cited a notable historical example from the late 1980s, when two pioneers of biochemical engineering — James Bailey and Frances Arnold, later awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — served together as married faculty members in Caltech’s Chemical Engineering department.
In 2026, UF’s happy CHE couples are comfortably rooted in Gainesville and a supportive college.
Patankar and Sampath have “two dogs, one child and another on the way.” Weaver and Hagelin-Weaver have two grown children. And Choi and Jang are “proud parents to a truly adorable child,” she said.
“He keeps us motivated and reminds us to love both our work and our life,” Jang concluded. “We hope our story can be a source of inspiration and motivation for our students.”