“You never know where the road will take you, when you learn to feed a zoo…”

Dr. Brooks has been in the comparative nutrition field for 22 years. From Pendleton, South Carolina, Dr. Brooks knew he wanted to work in the zoo field after his first overnight “ZooSnooze” at the Riverbank Zoo in Columbia, SC. After starting his undergraduate degree in Animal Veterinary Sciences at Clemson University, he transferred to Cornell University for his Junior and Senior year and started working at the Cornell University Sheep Farm. After an internship at the Fort Worth Zoo between his Junior and Senior year in their Nutritional Services Department, he knew that Zoo Nutrition was his way forward. After graduating with a B.S. in Animal Science, he was hired back to the Fort Worth Zoo Nutritional Services Department where he worked for two years before going back to school to get his M.S. degree in Nutrition from Texas A&M University studying marbling development in beef cattle. He immediately moved on to the University of Missouri – Columbia to get his Ph.D. in Animal Sciences – Ruminant Nutrition where he studied protein and CHO degradation in cattle and mule deer (specifically the mule deer herd at Washington State University). As a newly minted Ph.D., Dr. Brooks went to work as a Post-doc at North Carolina State University to study micro-mineral bioavailability in poultry. After all those years in the university setting, Dr. Brooks landed back in a zoo as the first Nutritionist for the Oregon Zoo, where he stayed for 7 years. In 2019, Dr. Brooks was hired on with the Indianapolis Zoo as their Director of Nutrition. In 2021, Dr. Brooks started his own nutrition consulting business, Animalis Nutrition Consulting, LLC, and was hired as the Small Animal Nutritionist for Nom Nom, a Nashville-based fresh pet food company. He resides outside of Indianapolis in Zionsville, IN with his wife, 2 boys, chinchilla, Russian tortoise, boxer, and his wife’s cat. When not working on exotic animal diets or formulating pet new recipes, he can probably be found out cooking with a Dutch oven while camping with the Scouts.