Anderson leads strategic activities and develops partnerships to support health and vitality with local communities across Essentia’s service area. She has a passion for improving health in rural communities and is involved in many coalitions focused on health and quality of life in Northern Minnesota.

With five James Beard Award nominations for his thriving dining portfolio, D’Amico brings culinary concepts to life and is the heart of the D’Amico kitchen operations. D’Amico & Partners isn’t just about excellent food – the D’Amico name is synonymous with superb, elegant dining experiences and inspired design. The Twin Cities restaurant portfolio currently includes Café & Bar Lurcat in Minneapolis, Campiello in Eden Prairie, The Brooklyn at Edinburgh USA Golf Course in Brooklyn Park, six D’Amico & Sons restaurants, plus 10 exclusive catering properties that combined serve thousands of weddings, meetings and celebrations of all sizes each year.

Most recently she led General Mills’ Global Health department as their chief medical officer managing its on-site clinic, designing the company’s global approach to preventive care, providing health advocacy to employees, and partnering with the Benefits team to implement company-wide well-being programs. Prior to working for General Mills, Dr. Halberg worked in private practice, hospital-based health systems, and with insurers in the areas of workers’ compensation and disability management. Her diverse background gives her a deep understanding of the healthcare industry from multiple perspectives. Her areas of expertise include employer health solutions leading to value-driven health care with improved quality and cost-appropriate care.

She conducts research to identify policies and programs that are effective in supporting good nutrition and health for all. She has led or collaborated on dozens of studies and published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers. Harnack also co-directs the Healthy Weight Research Center and directs the school’s Nutrition Coordinating Center, a center that provides software and services that support the dietary assessment needs of hundreds of researchers across the U.S.

Ibri is responsible for driving and overseeing all end-to-end sourcing and distribution of meals to the community, including partner relations and programs like SNAP outreach and child hunger efforts. Passionate about food, Ibri joins Second Harvest Heartland with 30 years of experience in the food industry and a career spanning three continents with Sodexo, General Mills and most recently founding The Fresh Connection, a food delivery startup in the Twin Cities. Ibri is both professionally and personally connected with the issues of ending hunger through community partnerships. During college, he co-founded “Les Restos du Coeur,” the first large scale food shelf in France, providing him with a very early opportunity to interact with various community members to source and collect food, find locations, organize distribution and to grasp the importance of dedicated volunteers. Ibri earned his master of business administration from the Harvard Business School and his bachelor of business administration from ESC Le Havre.

This has given her a richly textured experience of her home state. She joined Hospitality Minnesota as their Director of Strategic Alignment in January 2020 to help reshape the newly merged trade association serving the restaurant, lodging, resort and campground industry. In 2018, Kirby McGill launched Concord Strategies, a consultancy focused on helping clients align mission and action, for good, through organizational positioning, operational alignment and relationship management. She currently serves as the chair of the Minnesota chapter of Slow Food, an organization dedicated to fostering equitable access to good, clean, fair food.

As division head, Neumark-Sztainer works to ensure that faculty, staff, and students are engaging in state-of-the art research and training aimed at improving the health of the public. Neumark-Sztainer’s own research focuses on a broad spectrum of eating and weight-related outcomes including eating disorders, unhealthy weight control behaviors, body image, dietary intake, weight stigmatization, and obesity. She is dedicated to ensuring that her research has a positive impact on the health of the public, particularly vulnerable populations. She leads an active program of research including the largest and most comprehensive longitudinal body of research in the U.S. that examines predictors of eating- and weight-related problems in young people. Current research interests include investigating the potential for the practice of yoga as a tool to address eating disorders and relevant risk factors. Neumark-Sztainer is passionate about training students. She is the director of a new applied epidemiology training program for PhD students and post-doctoral fellows aimed at training the next generation of researchers to promote positive weight-related health among youth and families from diverse ethnic/racial and socio-economic populations. Neumark-Sztainer has published over 500 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Her research has been recognized with awards from the Academy for Eating Disorders, the National Eating Disorders Association, and the Eating Disorders Coalition and received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health to fund her work.

She currently works as the nutrition policy coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Health, where she promotes equitable access to healthy food through policy, systems and environment changes. Laura is also the current chair of the Legislative and Public Policy Committee for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

The association is committed to raising awareness, through a unified voice, to the significant role industry plays within its communities. Pfuhl has been with the organization for 24 years, serving as its president for the past fourteen. As an industry leader, Pfuhl sits on a variety of committees, boards, and task forces, raising awareness to the wide variety of issues facing the food industry. Pfuhl serves in Governor-appointed positions on the Food Safety Task Force and Good Food Access Advisory Committee. Pfuhl has served on the Board of Directors of the Food Industry Association Executives and Food Marketing Institute Government Relations Committee.

Rice serves on the volunteer cabinet for the school’s Driven: Shaping a future of health campaign, and is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota. As national adviser for governance and leadership at the Arthur J. Gallagher firm, he works to enhance the effectiveness of boards of directors of the health sector, nonprofit organizations, and credit unions across North America and Europe. He has worked in over 35 countries, and has held faculty positions at Cambridge University in England, Strathmore University School of Business in Nairobi, the Advance Institute for Health Management in Prague, and the University of Minnesota.

In 2015, she left her career as a physician to pursue a lifelong passion for cooking. After completing culinary school, Seddon worked in Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK including the iconic London institution, The River Café. After moving to Minneapolis, she was part of the team that opened Bellecour in Wayzata, has been chef to the Wild Hockey team, and has worked for the Broder’s family of restaurants. She is now running Jo’s Kitchen, her own successful small-scale bespoke catering and private dining company. As part of her “COVID-pivot,” she is now delivering handmade, restaurant-quality meals across the Twin Cities. Seddon is passionate about respecting the simplicity of uncompromisingly good, seasonal produce and enjoys cooking vegetable-forward food. She also believes strongly in the importance of teaching kids the life skills of cooking and eating well as they learn how to become healthy adults.

His main focus has been on the revitalization and evolution of Indigenous foods systems throughout North America. Chef Sean has studied on his own extensively to determine the foundations of these food systems to gain a full understanding of bringing back a sense of Native American cuisine to today’s world. In 2014, he opened The Sioux Chef as a caterer and food educator in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area. He and his business partner Dana Thompson also designed and opened the Tatanka Truck, which featured 100 percent pre-contact foods of the Dakota and Minnesota territories. In October 2017, Sherman was able to perform the first decolonized dinner at the James Beard House in Manhattan along with his team. His first book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, was awarded the James Beard medal for Best American Cookbook for 2018 and was chosen as one of the top ten cookbooks of 2017 by the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Smithsonian Magazine. Also that year, Chef Sean was selected as a Bush Fellow, and received the 2019 Leadership Award by the James Beard Foundation. The Sioux Chef team continues with their mission to help educate and make indigenous foods more accessible to as many communities as possible through the recently founded nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). Through this entity, Sherman sees this vision as even more relevant in the time of COVID. Educating the world on localizing food systems is critical and we believe that we can leverage NATIFS to expedite this mission. Learn more at www.natifs.org.

In this role he is responsible for managing the unit’s overall engagement strategy, which includes management of the funding programs and events. Standish’s decades of experience is grounded in research and project management, within both academia and the private sector. His work over the past decade has focused on public/private partnerships, and most recently with the University, he has developed a broad regional network of sustainability and environmental remediation expertise. Standish utilizes this network to connect University researchers with external partners to stimulate collaborative, interdisciplinary research and problem solving. His knowledge of the food and agricultural system — in the context of social, financial, and environmental sustainability and resilient, circular economies — will be valuable in ensuring inclusivity and equality for the “Food For Health Initiative” and its outcomes. Standish is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the U of M.

Dr. Steffen is also responsible for leading healthcare quality and affordability initiatives within the company’s medical management programs. He serves as the chair of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation Board and is a board member on the Minnesota Community Measures Board. Dr. Steffen came to Blue Cross in 2018 from Humana, where he focused on population health including national value based strategies for patients with chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease. Previously, he spent five years at the Mayo Clinic as a medical director within Preventive, Occupational and Aerospace Medicine while also serving as education chair for the division. Dr. Steffen’s career in medical leadership began with a three-year tenure as medical director for the Fairview Red Wing MedicalCenter, a position in which he collaborated with local businesses to improve health and control costs. Dr. Steffen began his work as a physician in rural Family Medicine and worked clinically in a variety of settings including community hospitals and academic medical centers. He has board certifications in Family Medicine, Preventive Medicine, and Occupational Medicine. Dr. Steffen received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota Duluth and both his medical degree and master’s in public health from the University of Minnesota.

NorthPoint which provides comprehensive medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmacy, laboratory, radiology, and human services has realized dramatic growth in patients, revenue, and mission effectiveness under her leadership. NorthPoint is administered through a partnership between Hennepin County and a Community Board of Directors composed of NorthPoint’s patients and people who live and/or work in the community. NorthPoint strives to improve the physical and socio-economic health of the North Minneapolis community through an integrated model of health and human services with its mission: Partnering to Create a Healthier Community. Whitney-West has extensive experience in governance and policy and has been honored with several leadership and fellowship awards including a Bush Leadership Fellowship, The International Black Women’s Congress Community Service, and as a 2015 Women’s Health Leadership TRUST honoree. She holds an MBA from the University of St. Thomas and a BSc in Biology from the University of Minnesota.  Whitney-West serves on the Twin Cities LISC Advisory Board, the Minnesota Association of Community Health Centers (MNACHC) Board, and is co-chair of the board of Directors of the African American Leadership Forum (AALF).