Mr. Bent has served with SFM Mutual Insurance Company since September of 2006 as the Vice President and Director of Underwriting and is responsible for the underwriting technical function. Mr. Bent also is responsible for: Rate, Rule and Form filings; Underwriting Regulatory Compliance; Underwriting Project Management; Loss Prevention Technical Functions; and Premium Audit as well as Environmental Resources Management (ERM) functions within the underwriting side of the operation.

Mr. Bent is a former Board Chair for the Minnesota Workers’ Compensation Insurers Association and former President of the Minnesota Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) Chapter. Mr. Bent was elected to the Governing Board for the Wisconsin Compensation Rating Bureau in May of 2017.

Mr. Bent earned a BA degree from Brigham Young University in 1988 and a MS degree in Industrial Safety from Central Missouri State University in 1989, the Associate in Risk Management (ARM) designation in 1999, and CPCU in 2007.

Immediately prior to joining SFM, Mr. Bent was the Vice President of Property, Casualty and Risk Management for Associated Financial Group a regional insurance brokerage firm in the Twin Cities. He also previously served as the Underwriting Manager and Team Leader for the Montana State Fund and, prior to that, worked seven years for EBI Companies in loss prevention, underwriting and management.

Dr. Craig continues part-time practice in occupational medicine.  After 25 years with General Mills, Dr. Craig retired in 1998 from General Mills, where he served as Vice-President and Director of Health and Human Services with responsibility for the medical, safety, industrial hygiene, environmental management, and employee services departments. General Mills’ headquarters is located in Minneapolis but is a multinational corporation.

Dr. Craig has also served as the Director, Secretary, Treasurer, Vice President and President of the American Academy of Occupational Medicine which merged with the American Occupational Medical Association to form the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. (He is a past president of the College). He has also served as the Director, Secretary, Treasurer of the American Occupational Medical Association; Chairman, Occupational Health Institute and President of the Minnesota Occupational Medical Association as well as President of the Minneapolis Academy of Medicine, Park Nicollet Institute, and Health Systems of Minnesota Institute (all in Minnesota).  He also served on the Board of Trustees at the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Medical Foundation, the Board of Directors of the Minneapolis Kiwanis Club, and the Board of Trustees of Crossroads College and Crossroads College Foundation (Rochester, MN).  Dr. Craig has collaborated with the Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety since its inception and was one of the Center’s founding members.

Dr. Susan Hallbeck, PE, CPE is the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Scientific Director of Health Care Systems Engineering in the Kern Center for the Science of Healthcare Delivery and faculty in Health Care Policy and Research, as well as Surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. She is a Professor and section head of Health Care Systems Engineering in the Mayo Medical School.

She is an emerita Professor in Industrial Engineering / Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the University of Nebraska Lincoln with a courtesy appointment in Surgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. While at the University of Nebraska, she served on the NIOSH Heartland Occupational Safety and Health Center (University of Iowa) Board of Advisors from their formation in 1999 until she moved to Mayo Clinic in 2012.

Susan earned her PhD from Virginia Tech, her MS from Texas Tech on a NIOSH traineeship and her BS from Iowa State University, all in Industrial Engineering.

She served as engineering lead for the VA Engineering Resource Center at the Nebraska-Western Iowa Veterans Health Administration Medical Center. She performed research at the Swedish National Institute for Working Life and The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research in the Quality of Worklife, Ergonomics and Innovation Department.

She is on the editorial board of Applied Ergonomics and an associate editor of and IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering. She has over 90 archival peer-reviewed publications. She was elected Fellow in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Fall 2014.

Susan’s research focus is to improve medical device ergonomics, teamwork and health care ergonomics for provider and patient safety. She is a certified professional ergonomist and professional engineer in industrial engineering with a specialty in human factors and ergonomics. Her work is currently focused in the operating room and emergency department.

Dr. Nico Pronk is President of the HealthPartners Institute and Chief Science Officer at HealthPartners, Inc. and 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.

Dr. Pronk’s work is focused on connecting evidence of effectiveness with practical applications of programs and practices, policies and systems that measurably improve population health and well-being. His work applies to the workplace, the health system setting, and the community and involves development of new models to improve health and well-being at the research, practice and policy levels.

Dr. Pronk was confirmed by the White House to serve as co-chair of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services’ Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for the year 2030 (aka “Healthy People 2030”). He is a current member of the Food and Nutrition Board and incoming Chair for the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. He is the founding and past president of the International Association for Worksite Health Promotion.
He is widely published in both the scientific and practice literatures and is an international speaker on population health and well-being. 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.

HealthPartners Institute is one of the largest medical research and education centers in the Midwest, the Institute has about 450 studies underway each year, trains more than 500 medical residents and fellows and more than 500 students, and provides continuing medical education for 25,000 clinicians as well as patient education and clinical quality improvement. HealthPartners, founded in 1957 as a cooperative, is an integrated, non-profit, member-governed health system providing health care services and health plan financing and administration. It’s the largest consumer governed nonprofit health care organization in the United States.

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.