Monica Bielski Boris is an experienced labor educator who teaches courses on a variety of topics including leadership skills, union mobilization and organizing, contract negotiations, grievance handling, arbitration, and political economy. Monica also conducts research on union revitalization and worker diversity and has partnered with labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO and SEIU (Service Employees International Union) to conduct applied research. Monica has a Ph.D. and MS in Industrial Relations from Rutgers University and a BA from Oberlin College. She comes from a working class, union background and is happy be in a profession that serves working people.

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. Steven Kirkhorn has served as the Director of the Minneapolis Veterans Administration (VA) Health Care System since 2013. He is also part of the Veterans Health Administration of the Veterans Administration nation Occupational/Environmental Medicine National Consult Program which provides consulting services to the other occupational health departments in the VA system. He serves as the Environmental Health Champion at a regional level, a national program to enroll veterans in Environmental Health Registries based upon their service exposures.

Dr. Kirkhorn received his undergraduate degree in zoology, medical degree, and master’s in public health in environmental health from the University of Minnesota. He completed his training in Family Practice and later in Occupational Medicine and is board certified in Family Practice and Occupational Medicine. Dr. Kirkhorn is a Fellow of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Previously, Dr. Kirkhorn was the Medical Director of the National Farm Medicine Center and the NIOSH National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Safety and Health, one of the ten NIOSH Agricultural Health and Safety Centers, and Chair of Occupational Health for the Marshfield Clinic from 2003-2013. Presently, he is Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Dr. Kirkhorn has been active over the years as a member of state and national public health committees and task forces, NIOSH review panels, and various non-profit organizations’ board of directors.

Dr. Kirkhorn is published in the area of agricultural respiratory disease, community health issues of animal confinement operations, and agricultural ergonomics and musculoskeletal disorders. He served as the Executive Editor of the Journal of Agromedicine from 2004-2012, a peer-reviewed journal indexed by National Library of Medicine and continues to be an associate editor. His interests are in rural occupational and environmental health, medical center occupational health, service-connected environmental exposures in veterans, issues affecting veterans’ return to work after active duty, agricultural medicine, and the interaction of personal health and occupational health.

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.

For 20 years, Vikki Sanders has worked at the Department of Labor and industry as the Workplace Violence Prevention consultant for the state of Minnesota.   She has worked 7 years as an OSHA investigator and 13 years as a consultant specializing in Workplace Violence, general industry safety and safety committees.

Vikki currently is the Public Sector Principal Consultant for the Department of Labor and Industry specializing with public sector employers. Vikki has taught over 510 businesses and 45,000 employees on safety topics to a variety of industrial settings including healthcare, education, manufacturing and business.

As a Consultant/Trainer and Co-Author of the workplace violence prevention manual, Vikki Sanders offers practical tools of awareness and understanding that will help make your workplace safer.

Brian Zaidman is a senior research analyst with the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry (DLI). He has been a member of the agency’s research team since 1987. During his lengthy tenure with DLI, Brian has studied a broad variety of workers’ compensation and workplace safety issues, including vocational rehabilitation, medical cost containment, insurance fraud, dispute resolution processes, workplace safety consultation effectiveness, and the undercount of occupational injuries and illnesses. Brian provides research support for the annual Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses and the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. As part of his efforts to improve the quality of Minnesota’s workplace injury and illness estimates, Brian regularly gives presentations on the basics of OSHA log recordkeeping.

Brian graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego, in 1978 and studied Social Psychology as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota from 1979 through 1984. Brian lives in Eagan, Minnesota, with his wife, Enrica and has three grown children. Brian is a member of the boards of directors of the Minnesota State Employees Combined Charities Campaign, Joseph’s Coat and the Temple of Aaron.