Spottiswoode studied zoology and botany at the
University of Cape Town, graduating in 2001 with
Bachelor of Science and
Honours degrees. She then undertook a
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at the
University of Cambridge under the supervision of
Nick Davies, which she completed in 2005. She remained at the University of Cambridge after completing her PhD, She held the Royal Society's Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship from 2008 to 2013. In 2013, she was awarded a L'Oreal "Women in Science" Fellowship. By 2016, she was a
senior research fellow at
Magdalene College, Cambridge. That same year, she returned to the University of Cape Town to take up the Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology at its
FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology. In 2025, she was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. ==Selected works==