He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 1996, after which he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder as a Postdoctoral Researcher and then a Hubble Fellow. He was appointed onto the faculty at the University of Maryland in 2001 where he has since maintained a research group working on the properties and environment impact of accreting black holes. Dr. Reynolds won the Helen B. Warner Prize for 2005 from the American Astronomical Society in recognition of his work on black hole astrophysics.