Description:

BeSustained, a national nonprofit with the mission of improving access to justice by advancing the well-being of public defenders, is conducting a national study of well-being in public defense. At this webinar, Harvard Business School researcher Jon Jachimowicz will share findings from a daily diary study conducted in November 2025, seeking to deepen our understanding of what drives passion, energy and sustainability in public defense. Matt Thiese, a researcher with the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, will share plans for the upcoming survey and focus groups that will survey issues affecting public defender well-being.   The findings and recommendations from this project will help support individual defenders, improve the organizations we work in, and inform the systems making budget and policy decisions that impact public defense.

Presenter Bio:

Jon M. Jachimowicz is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches the Leadership and Organizational Behavior course (LEAD) in the Required Curriculum. He studies the experience, antecedents, and consequences of passion. His work reveals that scholars and the broader public often fundamentally misunderstand passion.

Matthew S. Thiese, PhD, MSPH, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah’s Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, one of the 18 NIOSH-sponsored Education and Research Centers in the US. He earned his BS in Exercise and Sport Science (2001), MSPH in General Public Health (2003), and PhD in Occupational Injury Prevention (2008). Dr. Thiese’s dissertation focused on the predictive relationship on physical activity and the incidence of low back pain. This dissertation involved field measurements of workers’ on-the-job and leisure time physical activity. He has extensive experience in physical activity assessment, energy expenditure measurement, and observational research. Dr. Thiese’s primary areas of research interest are 1) transportation worker health and 2) musculoskeletal disorders. His research has included multiple field studies, including three large cohort studies and two large cross-sectional studies involving either transportation workers or musculoskeletal disorders. Dr. Thiese currently teaches three courses at the School of Medicine and is involved in multiple ongoing field research projects. Dr. Thiese has field experiences with measuring aerobic capacity and energy expenditures in both laboratory and occupational settings.

Jenny Andrews, she/her. A child of counterculture, raised off the grid by back-to-the-land hippies on the Lost Coast in Northern California, Jenny Andrews is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School. She started her career as a public defender in Oakland, California in 1996, but left after seven years, after experiencing burnout and moral injury, and didn’t practice law for three years. She returned to public defense work in 2007 and continued working as a public defender in Sonoma County and Santa Barbara County until 2022, consistently litigating cases and navigating challenges to sustainability in a wide variety of positions, including: Forensic Resource Counsel, Felony Team Leader, Director of Training, and Senior Deputy. In 2022, she became the Director of Training at the Indigent Defense Improvement Division of the Office of the State Public Defender, a new statewide effort to support and train indigent defenders in California. She teaches on the faculty of Gideon’s Promise, the National Association for Public Defense, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, the National Criminal Defense College, the Trial Advocacy Workshop at Harvard Law School, and the Stanford Trial Advocacy & New Defender Uplift Program (STANDUP). She is the founder and director of BeSustained, a national nonprofit with the mission of improving access to justice by advancing the well-being of public defenders. She speaks nationwide on public defense well-being and has been interviewed by Slate Magazine, Public Defenseless and Moral Matters podcasts.