Research

My research sits at the intersection of developmental psychology, neuroscience, and education. I study how economic scarcity — material hardship, income volatility, and the daily realities of poverty — shapes children's development and family wellbeing, and I work to advance strengths-based approaches that recognize the agency, adaptivity, and resourcefulness of families in lower-income contexts. More broadly, I'm interested in how this science moves into the world — including how public and legal institutions interpret and use developmental evidence — and in making sure it serves the public good.

Published or forthcoming

• Blakey, E., Hendry, A., Outhwaite, L. A., Braithwaite, E. K., Reyes, G., Hernandez, I. A., Ellwood-Lowe, M. E., & DeJoseph, M. L. (2026). Improving how to measure child socioeconomic disadvantage: A more holistic and contextual approach. Child Development Perspectives. [Link]
• Reyes, G. (2025). How Pokémon helped understand brain differences. Nature Reviews Psychology. [Link]
• Ellwood-Lowe, M. E., Reyes, G., DeJoseph, M. L., & Frankenhuis, W. E. (2025). Caring for children in lower-SES contexts: Recognizing parents' agency, adaptivity, and resourcefulness. Dædalus, 154(1), 52–69. [Link]
• DeJoseph, M. L., Ellwood-Lowe, M. E., Miller-Cotto, D., Silverman, D. M., Shannon, K. A., Reyes, G., Rakesh, D., & Frankenhuis, W. E. (2024). The promise and pitfalls of a strengths-based approach to child poverty and neurocognitive development: Implications for policy. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 66, 101375. [Link]

Manuscripts in preparation

• DeJoseph, M. L., Blakey, E., Ellwood-Lowe, M. E., Silverman, D., Reyes, G., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Fisher, P. (submitted). Parent narratives reveal how families adapt amid economic hardship "even if the rest of the world is falling apart."
• DeJoseph, M. L., Blakey, E., Laiduc, G., Reyes, G., Ellwood-Lowe, M. E., Silverman, D. M., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Fisher, P. A. (in prep). Capturing families' adaptive strengths in poverty: A thematic and computational analysis.
• Reyes, G., Liu, S., & Fisher, P. A. (in prep). Beyond income: Examining factors moderating material hardship levels among families with children.
• Reyes, G., Liu, S., Domingue, B. W., & Fisher, P. A. (in prep). Early childhood economic volatility and its psychological toll: Behavioral and mental health outcomes across the lifespan.
• Ricard, J. A., Antonacci, C., Reyes, G., Giampetruzzi, E., Ramduny, J., Grimsrud, G., Ellwood-Lowe, M., & Poldrack, R. (in prep). Area-level context and functional brain organization across the lifespan.

Public scholarship

• Reyes, G. (2023). Poverty and neuroscience. American Scientist, 111(6), 333–335. [Link]
• Reyes, G. (2017). Leave safe spaces alone. Brown Daily Herald.

Emerging directions: neuroscience, law & society

The newer questions I'm learning my way into share a common center of gravity: children's development, wellbeing, and justice. I'm early in this training, so these are open lines of inquiry rather than settled positions.

Developmental science in the courtroom. Brain and behavioral evidence is increasingly invoked in sentencing, particularly for young people, and I want to understand how ready that evidence actually is for legal application — and where the gaps remain. I'm equally interested in a puzzle that isn't scientific at all: even when the evidence indicates punishment won't deter or heal, the desire to punish endures. The psychology behind that impulse strikes me as key to whether restorative alternatives can take root in ways that still deliver accountability.

How the law judges parents. Our Dædalus paper made a scholarly case that parenting under severe material constraint is often misread — that what looks like neglect can reflect reasonable adaptation to impossible tradeoffs, and that easing those constraints beats retraining parents. I'd like to grow toward work that carries this evidence to where it has the highest stakes: family court determinations, child-welfare interventions, and the removal of children from their parents — including the developmental costs of family separation now playing out through immigration enforcement.

Growing up with AI. Children today are developing inside technology-saturated environments no previous generation has known. I'm curious what this means for their cognition, mental health, and behavior — and what unsettled questions of accountability and harm the law will face as a result. My hope is to help ensure that as courts and legislatures confront these questions, the developmental science is represented accurately and children's interests remain front and center.

For conference presentations, invited talks, and teaching, see my full CV.