Thomas Spillmann graduated with a diploma degree from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Leipzig, Germany in 1990. After being an assistant in a small animal clinic in Magdeburg, he was staff member at the Department of Small Animal Internal Medicine, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany from 1991-2002. There he received a doctoral degree in 1995 and became specialist in veterinary internal medicine (German degree) in 1996. He finished his habilitation thesis about the laboratory diagnosis and imaging of canine acute and chronic pancreatic diseases and became private docent at the Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was research fellow at the Department of Clinical Veterinary Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland, and received the status of a docent at the University of Helsinki in 2003. He became Diplomate of the European College of Small Animal Internal Medicine - Companion Animals (ECVIM-CA) in 2009. From 2004 to 2005, he was Hill’s professor of gastroenterology and clinical nutrition at the School of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany. Since 2005, he has been professor of small animal internal medicine at Department of Equine and Small Animal Medicine, University of Helsinki. 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).