As the Senior Director of Professionalism & Special Projects, Jordana oversees all aspects of the Professionalism Office’s work, including the 1L house system and the Law School’s wellness, professionalism, and peer mentorship offerings. Jordana also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Law, teaching Positive Lawyering and Peer Mentoring & Leadership. She was voted Fordham Law Adjunct Professor of the Year in 2021.

Prior to joining Fordham, Jordana served as the Assistant Director of Academic Counseling, Acting Clerkship Advisor, and a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. Jordana previously clerked for the Honorable Robert D. Sack on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and for the Honorable Paul A. Engelmayer on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Jordana is an expert in lawyer and law student mental health and well-being. She serves as as Co-Chair of the General Programming Committee of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Balance in Legal Education, and as a member of the Law School Assistance Committee of the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs, the ABA Attorney Well-Being Committee, and the NYC Bar Association Mindfulness & Well-Being in Law Committee. Jordana earned a Certification in Applied Positive Psychology from the New York Open Center in 2018

Lynn Boepple Su is a Professor of Law at New York Law School. She teaches Legal Practice, Evidence, Deposition Skills, and the Criminal Prosecution Clinic Seminar—New York County. She is also the Faculty Co-Advisor for the NYLS Trial Competition Team. She previously served as Co-Director of the NYLS Writing Program and the Writing Specialist. Professor Su also taught American Business Law: Sources and Methods, a course she designed for foreign-trained LL.M. students.

Professor Su began her legal career as an assistant district attorney in Bronx County, New York, where she litigated cases in New York State and City courts and coordinated the investigation and prosecution of economic crimes. She broadened her legal experience as an associate at several New Jersey law firms, concentrating in the area of employment litigation.

Professor Su’s background in private practice and as an assistant district attorney informs her teaching. She uses real-life examples to illustrate how the lawyering skills taught in class are used in practice. Her in-role exercises expose students to the human element of lawyering and help them develop their professional identities. Drawing on her teaching and practice experience, she co-authored The Lawyer’s Craft: An Introduction to Legal Analysis, Writing, and Advocacy and Teacher’s Manual for The Lawyer’s Craft.

Professor Su enjoys speaking at regional and international conferences that enable legal educators and professionals to share teaching innovations and law practice trends. She has presented on a wide variety of topics including writing skills, teaching foreign-trained lawyers, cross-cultural communication in legal practice, helping students overcome “imposter syndrome,” designing role-play exercises, and the prosecutor’s role in promoting justice.

Professor Su is a 2018 recipient of the Global Legal Skills Award, presented at the 13th Annual Global Legal Skills Conference held at Melbourne Law School in Melbourne, Australia, for “significant contributions to the promotion and improvement of global legal skills.” She is a former Co-Chair of the Legal Writing Institute’s Clinical Cooperation Committee and currently serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Law, Youth and Citizenship Committee and its Mock Trial Subcommittee. Professor Su is a member of the bars of New York and District of Columbia.

Kelli Simpson has been an instructional designer at Mitchell Hamline since 2021. She was an elementary educator for ten years with specific focus on environmental education, personalized learning, and culturally responsive teaching practices. Kelli has a variety of experience curating and implementing digital learning and professional development for educators. Kelli received her Bachelor’s of Science in biology from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and Master’s of Arts in teaching from Hamline University.

Brett Bowers was born in High Point and raised in the Triad, NC area. He has lived, studied, and worked in different regions of North Carolina. He comes to the School of Law from the North Carolina State University Counseling Center, where he practiced clinical counseling for nearly 7 years. During his time there, he coordinated the center’s substance abuse services and on-call system. He also served on its clinical, groups, and outreach committees, as well as intradivisional task forces. As a major service contributor, Brett has worked clinically with hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students.

Brett earned his Bachelor of Arts (psychology) degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999. He went on to study College Student Development at Appalachian State University, where he increasingly concentrated on counseling practice. After brief experiences with university disability and career counseling, he began focusing on the mental health aspects of student development and began his career as a university counseling center practitioner. Acknowledging substance use as an issue endemic to collegiate life, he began study for a post-master’s certificate in addiction counseling. Brett’s first counseling center placement was at all-women’s Meredith College in Raleigh.

After graduate school, Brett served for three years as Clinical Counselor and Director of Counseling Services at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte. Being a newly-incepted residential campus, Brett drew on his practical strengths in clinical counseling and his educational background in student development to build and formalize its student counseling services. In addition to face-to-face counseling, he concentrated on student outreach and was a consultant to academic advising, disability services, and the university’s behavioral monitoring unit.

Brett is a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor and Licensed Clinical Addictions Specialist in North Carolina. He is also certified by the National Board for Certified Counselors as a National Certified Counselor and Master Addictions Counselor. Brett is a member of the American Counseling Association, American College Counseling Association, and Addiction Professionals of North Carolina. He adheres to the Code of Ethics of the American Counseling Association.

Brett lives in Durham with his wife, also a mental health practitioner, and three children. He enjoys music, outdoor experiences, and family-oriented fun. He values moderation, well-roundedness, and potential.

Ron Hochbaum joined the faculty at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in 2021. He directs the Law School’s Homeless Advocacy Clinic and teaches Poverty Law.

Before joining the faculty at McGeorge, Professor Hochbaum was an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. At UDC, Professor Hochbaum directed its Housing and Consumer Law Clinic in which students represented housed and unhoused District residents in efforts to access and maintain healthy, safe, and affordable housing. He also served as a clinical teaching fellow at both Loyola University Chicago and Cornell University. In Loyola’s Health Justice Project, Professor Hochbaum taught lawyering skills to students in the context of a medical-legal partnership with Erie Family Health Center. At Loyola, he also taught Access to Health Care, a seminar exploring the legal, political, social and environmental issues surrounding health equity in the United States. As a Clinical Teaching Fellow in the Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic at Cornell Law School, Professor Hochbaum developed a unique experiential opportunity for students to conduct legal outreach to farm workers in California’s Central Valley. As part of the program, he established a partnership between Cornell Law School and the United Farm Workers.

In practice, Professor Hochbaum worked first as a Staff Attorney and then a Supervising Attorney at the Homeless Action Center in Berkeley and Oakland, California. At the Homeless Action Center, he represented unhoused and mentally ill clients in claims for public benefits. His representation included holistic and barrier-free services that employed housing first and harm reduction principles. He also worked on special projects addressing the criminalization of homelessness. He helped organize the “No on Measure S” campaign that prevented sitting on the sidewalk from becoming a misdemeanor offense in the City of Berkeley. Moreover, he served as one of the lead counsel in Cody et al. v. City of Albany (3:13-cv-5270), bringing claims alleging the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of individuals in a homeless encampment were violated by the municipality’s targeted enforcement of an anti-camping ordinance.

Professor Hochbaum earned a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations where he received the Clem Miller Scholarship. Upon graduation, he worked as a consultant at the International Labour Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He earned his Juris Doctor from Villanova University School of Law where he served as the Managing Editor of Outside Articles for the Villanova Sports and Entertainment Law Journal. Villanova awarded him both the Dorothy Day Award and ALI-ABA Scholarship and Leadership Award. After graduating, he clerked for the Honorable Terrence R. Cook of the New Jersey Superior Court.

Professor Hochbaum’s research explores the criminalization of homelessness, situating it at the intersection of scholarship on the criminalization of poverty and critical outsider jurisprudence. His work examines the interplay between the criminalization of poverty and the ever-evolving nature of segregation. In the process, he demonstrates that anti-homeless bias and the intersections of homelessness and race, gender, disability and LGBTQIA+ identity drive our expanding definition of crime and the effort to equate homelessness with danger and criminality.

Janet Stearns, Dean of Students and Lecturer in Law, joined the University of Miami Law School in October, 1999 as director of International and Foreign Graduate Programs. In 2007 she was appointed Dean of Students. Since 2011, Dean Stearns also regularly teaches Professional Responsibility.

In 2020, Dean Stearns and the Miami Law Student Services Team received NALSAP’s CORE Four Annual Award, recognizing the “competencies, values and ethics of the very best law student affairs professionals.” Dean Stearns is the Immediate Past Chair for the AALS Student Services Section. She is also a member of the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs, where she is an advocate for wellness programming in law schools. Since becoming Dean of Students, Dean Stearns has been passionate about wellness initiatives, including the Fall Wellness Week, the spring Mental Health Day, and a weekly Dean of Students Constitutional (walk) around the campus. She coordinates closely with the School’s Mindfulness in Law program, and drafted the Preface to Scott Roger’s book Mindfulness for Law Students (Mindful Living Press, 2009).

At the University of Miami, she serves as Title IX Liaison, a member of the President’s Coalition the President’s Coalition on Sexual Violence Prevention and Education, a member of President’s Commission on Alcohol and Other Drugs, and a member of the UM Wellness Center Advisory Board.

A native of New York, she is a graduate of Yale College (1984) and Yale Law School (1988). She was admitted to the bar in Connecticut (1989) and Washington State (1994). Before coming to UM, Dean Stearns was a profesora visitante at the University of Chile where she taught two law courses in Spanish. She also taught in the area of affordable housing development and directed a clinical program at the University of Washington School of Law.

In her senior year at Yale College, she was elected to the New Haven Board of Aldermen where she served for two years until beginning law school. Yale Law School, she received both the C. LaRue Munson Prize for Clinical Work and the Clifford L. Porter Prize for Best Paper in Taxation. Upon her graduation from Yale Law, she practiced law for five years with Robinson & Cole, a large commercial firm in Hartford, Connecticut. Her practice areas included commercial real estate, land use, and nonprofit organizations. She was admitted to practice law in both Connecticut (1989) and Washington State (1994).

Her community activities include serving as the Advocacy Chair for the Miami Affiliate of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network and volunteering with the Florida Democratic Party’s Voter Protection Team. She previously served as President of the Miami Council for International Visitors (2006-2007) and Treasurer of the Coral Reef Senior High School Lacrosse Booster.  She is a very proud mother of twin sons, Justin (a 2020 graduate of Haverford College) and Gabriel (a 2020 graduate of Boston University).