Jeff Bale gained a first class honours degree from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1973 and then completed his PhD at Newcastle in 1977 for ‘Aspects of the behaviour and ecology of the beech leaf-mining weevil Rhynchaenus fagi L.’. He held the Lord Adams Fellowship at Newcastle (1977-1979) and was then appointed as a Lecturer in Crop Entomology at Leeds University, and promoted to a Senior Lectureship in 1988. He was appointed to the Professorship in Environmental Biology at Birmingham University in 1992. His main area of research is on the thermal biology of insects and mites, which has developed into the recent studies on the environmental risk assessment of non-native species. He has produced 200 publications and supervised over 50 PhD students.
He was a member of the IOBC-WPRS Commission on the Harmonisation of Invertebrate Biological Control Agents (CHIBCA) and succeeded Franz Bigler as Convenor of the Commission in 2006. He was coordinator of the ‘Invertebates’ work package in the EU-funded REBECA project and is a member of the UK’s ‘Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE)’ that advises the UK government on the release of non-native biocontrol agents.
