My full CV with Publication List (December 2025) can be found here: Smallegange_CV and Publication List December 2025. My publications can also be found on Google Scholar.

Qualifications

2022                  Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (UK)
2014                  University Teaching Qualification for Lecturers (BKO)
5 Sep 2007      PhD, ‘Interference competition and patch choice in foraging shore crabs’
5 Sep 2007     Netherlands Inst. for Sea Research & University of Amsterdam
2000                  BSc, MSc Population Biology, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Professional history

2022 – present       Senior Lecturer, SNES, Newcastle University, UK
2024 – present       Co-Lead Behaviour Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence
2024 – present       Director of Culture & Inclusion, SNES, Newcastle University, UK
2023 – present       Group Lead, Modelling, Evidence and Policy group, Newcastle University, UK
2022 – 2024            Co-Director Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University, UK
2018 – 2022            Associate Professor, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam
2013 – 2018            MacGillavry Fellow (tenure track), Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam
2012 – 2013            Research Fellow at University of Oxford (Dept. of Zoology)
2010 – 2012            Research Fellow at Imperial College London (Silwood Park)
2008 – 2010            Rubicon Fellowship (NWO)– held at Imperial College London
2007 – 2008            A. v Humboldt Fellowship – Max Planck Inst. for Ornithology
2005                        Marie Curie Research Trainee Fellowship – University of Exeter
Maternity leave     Dec 2012 – June 2013

Research interests

Research conducted within the team ties three research themes:

Eco-evolutionary dynamics, functional trait demography, and developmental plasticity

Climate variability is increasing. How will this affect different animal species? We are in great need of an integrative framework that allows ecologists to predict how animals respond to change depending on their life history strategies (i.e. the different ways in which individuals trade-off resource investment into survival or reproduction). The DEB-IPM project (see Teaching Tab on my Newcastle University website) is such a framework, in which we link the characteristics of coldblooded animals to their population response to environmental change.

The DEB-IPM project uses the DEBBIES dataset, which can download here along with the accompanying paper by Smallegange & Lucas (2024). For those interested,  I’ve recorded a couple of videos explaining  what a DEB-IPM is and how you can apply DEB-IPMs to answer life history and conservation questions. 

Including eco-evolutionary dynamics in this framework is essential to understand how evolutionary changes (like shifts in genotype and phenotype frequencies) and ecological changes (like population size and growth) influence each other. Historically, ecologists and evolutionary biologists overlooked each other’s processes due to differing time scales. However, recent perspectives highlight the interplay between these variables. Our research focuses on predicting eco-evolutionary population responses to environmental changes through long-term experiments with bulb mites and demographic models for estuarine and coastal marine species. Particularly in human-dominated coastal areas, we aim to understand how human activities affect life history traits and population dynamics. For more details, see our contribution to the special issue on “Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Marine Biodiversity in Human-Dominated Coastalscapes“, to which the team contributed.

Finally, the eco-evolutionary process can be significantly influenced by developmental plasticity. Developmental plasticity, whereby a specific input during an individual’s development produces a lasting alteration in phenotype, has been well-documented in human and non-human animals. It is studied by both evolutionary biologists and researchers studying human health. Importantly, developmental plasticity can alter the direction of evolutionary change. An example of this can be found in this paper (Deere & Smallegange 2023) to the extent that phenotypic variation derived from development becomes encoded in the genome. How to integrate developmental plasticity into eco-evolutionary population dynamics I explain in my 2022 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. A more recent paper in Evolution Letters (2024) argues how a development-centric perspective explains the pace-of-life syndromes of animals and how they relate to responses to environmental change.