Dr. Finder’s educational background includes a BS in Industrial Education and a MS in Safety from UW-Stout, a Doctorate of Industrial Technology from the University of Northern Iowa, and accreditation as a Certified Industrial Hygienist by the American Board of Industrial Hygiene. In 2003, Brian was recognized by the College of Technology, Engineering and Management for his teaching excellence and received UW-Stout’s Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award in August of 2010. In addition to researching the attenuation qualities of anti-vibration gloves, an experimental study of his identified that long-term/repeated cold exposure produces a semi-permanent form of peripheral nervous system impairment in meat processing workers. The results of this study were presented in March of 2006 at the 9th Annual Applied Ergonomics Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Having served as the Program Director for the M.S. Risk Control program, Brian presently teaches various courses within the Operations and Management Department, including Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics, Fleet Risk Control Management, Principles of Occupational Risk Control / Safety and Field Problems in Risk Control. He also teaches a series of five courses which allows individuals to become certified by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and/or the Department of Transportation in order to teach traffic safety education.

Prior to joining the Risk Control Center faculty in January of 1995, Brian spent ten years as a safety and industrial hygiene technical support professional for high-tech, heavy/light manufacturing, agricultural, and food processing-related industries. He routinely provides industrial hygiene as well as safety-based consultation for various types of manufacturing and service-based organizations.

James Kelly, M.S. has over 25 years of experience with the State of Minnesota in the environmental health field, at both the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). He is currently the manager of the Environmental Surveillance and Assessment Section at MDH, which: develops, maintains, and applies expert risk assessment techniques so that environmental hazards are assessed using sound science; conducts public health activities related to contaminant releases; and tracks the occurrence and characteristics of environmental health issues such as climate change.

Dr. Nico Pronk is Vice President for Health Management and Chief Science Officer at HealthPartners, an integrated, non-profit and member-governed health system headquartered in Minnesota. Nico is also a Sr. Research Investigator at the HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research, an integrated research and medical education division of the HealthPartners organization. Nico holds a faculty appointment as Adjunct Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a visiting professor in the department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

Dr. Pronk’s work is focused on connecting evidence of effectiveness with the practical application of programs and practices, policies and systems that measurably improve population health and well-being. Solutions of this kind may be applied to the workplace, the care delivery setting, and the community and therefore also involve the development of new models to improve health and well-being at the research, practice and policy levels.

Dr. Pronk is a member of the Community Preventive Services Task Force and the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. He is co-chair of the CEO Innovation Collaborative at the National Academies of Medicine, an initiative focused on cross-sector partnerships involving the business and industry sector. He is the founding and past president of the International Association for Worksite Health Promotion and was appointed by the Armed Forces Surgeon’s General and confirmed by the White House to serve on the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board.

He is widely published in both the scientific and practice literature and is a national and international speaker on population health and health promotion. Dr. Pronk received his doctorate degree in exercise physiology at Texas A&M University and completed his post-doctoral studies in behavioral medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

John has worked with many unions in Minnesota on a diversity of projects, including the Building Trades, Wage Theft Coalition, the MN Department of Labor and Industry, Construct Tomorrow, and the Fair Contracting Foundation. He was an advisor to the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board (CAAPB) on the building of the Workers’ Memorial Garden in St. Paul.

John started producing television programs in 1982 while an undergraduate at the U of MN as a director, writer, editor, and on-air talent. With these skills he began his work at LES in 1984 by cofounding “Minnesota At Work” which became the longest-running, regularly scheduled cable television in the U.S. about labor and working people, and which ended in 2009 when programming migrated to the web.

He was one of the founders of the Union Producers and Programmers Network (UPPNET). For 30 years he’s been teaching video production classes and produced many video projects for LES. He served on the board of the Minneapolis Television Network (MTN) 1989-1996, eventually as board chair, and was instrumental in promoting MTN’s non-profit internet service to unions around the state. In 1993, John began teaching classes in website creation, internet skills including social media, and is responsible for dozens of local unions’ websites.

In 2000 he became the webmaster for WorkdayMinnesota.org. He has been active as a representative on two University governance committees. He is a long-time member and Trustee of IATSE Local 219, an associate member of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild and Typographical Union, and a past member of Teamsters Local 4.

Marco Yzer is Professor of Health Communication at the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication (SJMC). He also has an adjunct professor appointment at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.

Yzer holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (1999). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (2000-2001), and Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam (2002-2005). His research focuses on motivational processes that explain how mass-mediated and interpersonal communication may lead or inhibit health behavior, and on how understanding of these processes can inform the design of messages that can help people improve their health.

He has consulted on the design and evaluation of numerous health promotion interventions in the U.S., the Netherlands, Mexico, and South Africa on safe sex, alcohol use, drug use, cancer screening, vaccination and smoking cessation, among others. His work has been published in communication, public health and psychology academic journals.

At the University of Minnesota Yzer is the Director of Graduate Studies of the SJMC’s Health Communication MA program. He advises MA students in that program as well as MA and PhD students in the SJMC’s academic graduate programs whose research focuses on health communication.