[2] She is Curators Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri, and a winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
[3] Beginning with a master's degree in 1979, she studied mathematics education as a graduate student at the University of Missouri, completing her Ph.D. there in 1985.
[3] Her dissertation, supervised by Douglas Arthur Grouws, was Identification and Characterization of Mental Computation Algorithms Used by Seventh and Eighth Grade Students on Visually and Orally Presented Mental Computation Exercises.
[5] In 2014 the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators named Reys as their Judith Jacob's Lecturer.
[5] In 2016, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics gave her their Lifetime Achievement Award.