Jessica Hopfield and James Francis Cleary Jr. were married Dec. 23 at San Francisco City Hall. The Rev. Timothy Mills, a nondenominational minister, officiated.
The couple each received an M.B.A. from Harvard, she with high distinction.
Ms. Hopfield, 55, is an independent health care strategist now based in Boston, but starting in January she is to be based in New York. She is a trustee of the Joslin Diabetes Center, a diabetes clinic and research center in Boston affiliated with Harvard Medical School, of which until June she was a chair. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and received a doctorate in biochemistry from Rockefeller University
She is a daughter of Cornelia Fuller of Altadena, Calif., and John J. Hopfield of Princeton, N.J. The bride’s father, a theoretical physicist, is the emeritus Howard A. Prior Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton. He is known for his invention in 1982 of the associative neural network, known as the Hopfield Network. Her mother was a stay-at-home-parent.
Mr. Cleary, 56, is the executive vice president and the chief financial officer at AmerisourceBergen, a pharmaceutical sourcing and distribution services company in Conshohocken, Pa. Until 2015, he was the president and chief executive of MWI Veterinary Supply in Boise, Idaho, a distributor of animal health products. He graduated from Dartmouth.
He is the son of the late Barbara M. Cleary and the late James F. Cleary Sr., both of whom lived in Boston. The groom’s mother, was the lead bridal and designer buyer at Jordon Marsh Department Stores in Boston. His father was the president of the Blyth, Eastman Dillon & Company, a securities firm in New York. His parents founded Pops on the Heights, the annual Boston College scholarship gala, which has assisted more than 2,900 students.
The bride’s previous marriage ended in divorce, as did the groom’s previous marriage.
The couple were introduced in 2018 through a mutual friend who sent Mr. Cleary a letter describing Ms. Hopfield at length. She lived in Boston, and he in Philadelphia. On his next visit to Boston, they briefly met over a Clean Green Protein drink at Juice Press, a juice bar in the Back Bay area. They decided to then meet halfway, in New York, for their first real date, where they attended a Giacometti exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” on Broadway. A year later, Mr. Cleary got down on one knee and proposed at the same juice bar where they met in Boston, and ordered the same protein drinks.
