Martha Randolph Simms and Eric Benjamin Lorber were married April 13 in Atlanta. The Rev. Timothy H. Black, an Episcopal priest, officiated at Cator Woolford Gardens, with Joyce Bihary, a retired chief judge of the federal bankruptcy court in Atlanta, taking part.
Ms. Simms, 32, is the special adviser on policy relating to detentions, watchlisting, countering violent extremism and other issues to the State Department’s ambassador at large for counterterrorism, in Washington. She graduated magna cum laude from Tufts, and received a master’s degree in international relations and economics, concentrating on European studies, from Johns Hopkins University.
She is a daughter of Charlotte E. Erwin and Bryan R. Simms of Glendale, Calif. The bride’s father retired as a professor of musicology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her mother retired as the head of archives and special collections at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
The bride is also a direct descendant of John Winthrop and of Thomas Dudley, both governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in its earliest years.
Mr. Lorber, 35, is a director at the Financial Integrity Network, a Washington consultancy focused on sanctions, anti-money-laundering initiatives and compliance. He is also the senior director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power, a program of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, also in Washington. He graduated magna cum laude from Columbia and received a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
He is a son of Elizabeth Cromwell Lorber and Henry P. Lorber of Atlanta. The groom’s mother was until 2015 a chef at Watershed, a restaurant in Atlanta, and is to begin working as a chef in July at Redbird, an Atlanta restaurant that the groom’s brother is opening. The groom’s father is a financial consultant in Decatur, Ga., advising clients on debt restructuring and commercial real estate transactions.
The couple met in September 2016 at a happy hour in Washington that was hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, where both were young professional fellows. He introduced himself as she was leaving, but when the couple met again in November, after having connected through the League, a dating app, she didn’t recall the encounter at all. That bit of awkwardness aside, the two went out and hit it off immediately.
