Dale is an Associate Professor and ARC DECRA fellow at the Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University. His research focuses on how disturbance shapes biodiversity.
Dale completed his PhD (2011) on how animal species respond to fire regimes in semi-arid southern Australia. After that, he undertook a research fellowship with Professor Andrew Bennett on the concept of ecological resilience and its relevance to applied ecology.
Dale was then awarded an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellowship at Deakin University, where he continued to work in the area of disturbance ecology. He took up a lectureship at Charles Sturt University in 2015, and in 2017 began an ARC DECRA, studying the impacts of Aboriginal burning on wildlife.