By Richard LeComte 

LEXINGTON, Ky. – Blazer Dining Hall on the University of Kentucky campus might not strike one as a prime location for romance, but it worked great for Stephanie Carpenter, Ph.D., and Christopher Collins. 

The couple, now engaged, began their journey together in the hall in 2010 they were undergrads in UK’s College of Arts and Sciences.  

“When we first met, I had come from a dance rehearsal,” said Carpenter, who was a chemistry major from Nicholasville. “I was part of the University of Kentucky Dance Ensemble. I was between rehearsals, and I went to Blazer Dining Hall to get some breakfast. While I'm there, there's this girl from my high school, and she says, ‘Hey Stephanie, do you know this guy? He lives in your dorm, and he's from New York.’  I had no clue who he was, because it was still pretty early on in the semester, and we got to talking, I just remember calling my mom afterwards, saying, ‘I met the guy I'm going to marry someday.’ And she says, ‘Great, what's his name?’ I couldn't tell her. So we called him Blazer Boy for months until I could learn his name.” 

Blazer Boy — sorry, Collins — grew up in Rochester, New York, and graduated as an economics major in 2016; Carpenter graduated in 2015. She said they first formed a friendship before they started dating.  

“If you ask any of our friends, we were dating long before that, but both of us were too shy to actually say anything,” she said. 

Then for his last year at UK, Collins roomed with her parents in Nicholasville while she went off to earn a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Rochester. She said that she had her eye on the institution, known for its Chemistry Department, before she met Collins, but her connection to his family sweetened the deal. 

“I decided to go before we actually started dating, because at that point, I knew his family, I felt comfortable going there,” she said 

Since UK, Carpenter and Collins have intertwined their careers — she’s in science and he’s in finance. Just before the COVID pandemic, they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she held a post-doctorate position at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Now she’s still working at Los Alamos in management, and he is working as a financial planning analysis manager for a New Mexico firm called Herbs, Etc. They’re shooting for a wedding in Kentucky late in 2027. 

“We figured we've been together, 12 and a half years, so we're not in any rush,” she said. “We don't want to be stressed, especially because we want to get married in Kentucky, and being out here makes planning a little bit harder. I just put the deposit down for our wedding planner to help us with that.”