Dr. Gretchen Myers Hill received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Kentucky, Master of Science degree from Purdue University and a doctoral degree from Michigan State University. Following a post-doctoral experience at the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine, she joined the faculty in the School of Public Health’s Nutrition Program. After five years, she joined the faculty in the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at the University of Missouri before returning to Michigan State University in the Animal Science Department.

Dr. Hill and her students are known for their research in trace elements and their interactions at the cellular and animal level including the impact on transporter proteins, etc. Her work with Dr. Don Mahan at Ohio State University investigated the need of the pig for trace elements in practical diets used in the United States.

Hans Blonk, owner and managing director of Blonk Consultants, is a biologist graduated from Leiden University. After his studies he got interested in the Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) method and was one of the developers of the first LCA methodology in the Netherlands. Since then the main focus of his career has been the environmental assessment of agri-food products. Over the years he has made important contributions to the development of LCA and Carbon Footprinting methods for agri-food products. In 1999 he established his own business. Blonk Consultants now consists of seventeen specialists in the impact assessment of food products and is one of the leading companies in this field worldwide.

Kristian Koefoed Brandt (KKB) is an associate professor (since 2007) and leader of the Environmental Microbiology Research Group (since 2016) at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is also a senior lecturer (since 2013) at the Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research in Beijing, China. His expertise is in microbial ecology, environmental microbiology, and microbial ecotoxicology and his research group use state-of-the-art technologies to study microbiomes and their interactions in a range of different environments. The environmental dimension of antibiotic resistance has been a major research area for the last decade with a special emphasis on the role of metals for expansion of the soil bacterial resistome. KKB has also authored several reviews on risks associated with environmental development and transfer of antibiotic resistance.

Lisbeth Shooter is Specialized Senior Manager, Pigs, in SEGES Pig Research Centre with the overall responsibility of coordinating the pig innovation activities. Moreover, Lisbeth is also the team manager of the Feed Efficiency team. Having graduated in 2006 with a MSc in Animal Science from the former Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (now University of Copenhagen), Lisbeth spent 7 years in England working for BPEX (now AHDB Pork) as a Knowledge Transfer Manager working with and advising pig producers. In 2013 Lisbeth returned to Denmark to take up the role as Head of Department for the agricultural consultancy company Patriotisk Selskab, where she continued to work with pig producers as a consultant until moving to SEGES Pig Research Centre in 2015.

Dr Kevin Waldron is a Principal Research Fellow based in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. His research aims to understand the selectivity and specificity of metalloproteins for metal cofactors, and the molecular mechanisms of biological metal homeostasis. His previous research has made important contributions, including uncovering novel mechanisms of homeostasis, identification of novel homeostatic components, and development of the ‘metal buffering’ model of cellular metal regulation. Current projects in the Waldron lab range from the molecular scale (structure/function and biochemical studies of metalloenzymes), through the cellular scale (determining novel mechanisms of metal homeostasis in bacterial pathogens), to the organismal scale (studying how metal starvation and metal excess are utilised by the immune system to restrict pathogenic infections).

Daniel Brugger is interested in the regulative mechanisms of nutrient homeostasis and associated metabolic pathways as well as the kinetics and dynamics of undesirable feedborne substances within the animal organism. In this context, the metabolism of essential trace elements and nitrogen as well as the effects of trypsin inhibitors and phasins from feed are currently investigated. Further projects are related to the interaction between plant raw materials and the gastrointestinal immune system as well as the modulation of the feed value by germination of plant seeds.
The development of precise experimental models provides the methodological basis. Subsequently, state-of-the-art approaches of chemical analysis, enzymatics, protein biochemistry and molecular biology, provide a deep insight into the adaptive processes on the metabolic and subcellular level. The long-term goal is the definition of recommendations for practical livestock feeding.