[4] Reye attended Townsville Grammar School and the University of Sydney, where he completed undergraduate studies in medicine and was awarded a MBBS in 1937.
[2][4] Reye joined the staff of the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children (RAHC) in 1939 as a pathologist, and remained there for all his working life.
On 16 July 1977, Reye died at the age of 65, of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm at Royal North Shore Hospital, 24 hours after he had retired from the RAHC.
[2] In 1958, Reye identified a disease that involved muscular weakness in which the muscle fibres appeared as thick threads or rods.
[6][7] In 1963, Reye, Graeme Morgan, and Jim Baral reported a kind of brain disease in The Lancet.