Dr. Mark Umbreit is a professor and the founding director of the Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work.  Dr. Umbreit also serves on the faculty of the Center for Spirituality and Healing in the U.of M. Academic Health Center, teaching courses on Peacemaking & Spirituality, and Forgiveness & Healing. During the 2005-06 academic year, he was the Boden Chair Visiting Scholar at the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee and has served as a Fellow of the International Centre for Healing and the Law in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for two years. 

He is an internationally recognized practitioner and scholar with more than 35 years of experience as a mediator, trainer, researcher, and author of six books and more than 130 articles, book chapters, and monographs in the fields of restorative justice, mediation, and peacemaking. Dr. Umbreit has conducted training seminars and lectures throughout the entire United States, Canada, as well as in Belgium, China, Colombia, Denmark, England, Japan, Northern Ireland, Holland, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad, and Ukraine.

 Dr. Umbreit’s career began in Valparaiso, Indiana, in the mid-1970s as the co-founder of PACT, Prisoner and Community Together, a community-based organization providing services to offenders and victims in several communities. As president of PACT, he was involved in the development of the first Victim Offender Reconciliation Program in the U.S. (in Elkhart, Indiana) and the early development of the restorative justice movement during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dr. Umbreit was appointed to the Governor’s Task Force that drafted Indiana’s Community Corrections Act.

 With multi-year support from the Office for Victims of Crime of the U.S. Department of Justice, Dr. Umbreit and his colleagues at the Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota developed a new generation of victim-sensitive victim/offender mediation and conferencing resources, including a six-part video series, training manuals, and other reports. For the past 24 years he has served as a consultant/trainer for the U.S. Department of Justice.

 As a practitioner, he specializes in facilitating a dialogue between family survivors/victims of severe violence, primarily homicide, and the offender. Dr. Umbreit has worked on numerous cases of severe violence in 11 states and 4 countries. He has conducted numerous multi-site and cross-national studies of restorative justice and victim offender mediation. He is currently engaged in a study to assess the impact of new restorative justice initiatives in six regions of the former Soviet Republic, the Ukraine. His most recent book, Facing Violence: The Path of Restorative Justice & Dialogue, reports on the first multi-site study of victim offender mediation and dialogue in crimes of severe violence, primarily homicide.

Dr. Umbreit and his colleagues have initiated a Community Peacemaking Project to promote sustained dialogue among diverse communities in response to hate crimes, intolerance, and political violence. This effort has involved partnerships with Native Americans in the Pine Ridge/Rapid City area of South Dakota, the Arab-Jewish Peace Alliance in Albuquerque, Somali-Muslim leaders in Minneapolis, Palestinian and Jewish leaders in Minneapolis, a gay-lesbian coalition in Colorado, and Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, through the Seeds of Hope project, and Palestinians and Jews in Israel. He has initiated the first Palestinian-Jewish dialogue group in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community, as well as a  new Muslim Restorative Justice Outreach project in the Twin Cities. 

Dr. Umbreit and his work has appeared in numerous newspapers throughout the United States, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Minneapolis StarTribune. His work has also been highlighted in television documentaries produced by the Canadian Film Board, Granada TV in England, British Broadcasting Corporation, NHK Productions in Japan, ABC network, HBO, and a  film on the growing restorative justice movement produced by the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. His work has also appeared on numerous talk shows and TV journalism shows, including "Good Morning America", "The Today Show" and "20/20".