Dr. Ruurd T. Zijlstra is Professor of Swine and Carbohydrate Nutrition and Chair of the Department of Agricultural, Food & Nutritional Science at the University of Alberta in Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Univ. of Illinois following education at Wageningen Univ. in The Netherlands. His research is largely focused on unique aspects of carbohydrate nutrition, nutritional quality of co-products in pigs, feed quality evaluation techniques, and dietary means to enhance gut health in pigs. He has co-authored 150 peer reviewed papers and 10 book chapters, supervised 24 graduate students and 16 post-doctoral fellows, and presented 146 invited papers. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous prestigious journals. He has been a member of the organizing committee of Banff Pork Seminar since 2005 serving since 2012 as Program Chair or Co-Chair, and was a member of the organizing committee for the 2012 Digestive Physiology of Pigs meeting.