Thomas Spillmann graduated as veterinarian from the University of Leipzig, Germany in 1990. In the following year, he was assistant in a small animal clinic in Magdeburg. From 1991-2002, he worked at the Department of Small Animal Internal Medicine, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany where he received a doctoral degree in 1995 and specialist degree in veterinary internal medicine in 1996. He finalized his postdoc research about the laboratory diagnosis and imaging of canine acute and chronic pancreatic diseases in 2002. After being research fellow at the Department of Clinical Veterinary Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland, 2002-2004, he was Hill’s professor of small animal gastroenterology and clinical nutrition at the School of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany. Since 2005, he has been professor of small animal internal medicine at the Department of Equine and Small Animal Medicine, University of Helsinki. In 2009, he became Diplomate of the European College of Veterinary Internal Medicine – Companion Animals (ECVIM-CA). He was board member of the Gastrointestinal Study Group at the German Society of Small Animal Medicine 1998-2005 and president/past president of the European Society of Comparative Gastroenterology from 2003 – 2011. His main research interest is small animal gastroenterology and endoscopy and he leads the Finnish small animal gastroenterology research group FIN-SAGAS (www.helsinki.fi/fin-sagas).