Bruce Cameron Reed earned a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 1984. His doctoral work was in observational astronomy, a study of the distribution of stars in the Puppis direction of the Milky Way. Just before formally finishing his graduate work, he became a faculty member in the Department of Physics at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1983. There he continued to work in observational astronomy, and, in 1992, took up a position as Associate Professor of Physics at Alma College in Michigan. At Alma he began to develop an interest in the history and physics of the Manhattan Project. This grew into his primary research focus, and has resulted in several dozen journal papers, five books (three with Springer, one of which has gone into a third edition), and the teaching of a general-education class on the development of nuclear weapons.

Prof. Reed was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2009 in recognition of his work on the Manhattan Project, served as Editor of the APS's Physics & Society newsletter (2009-13), and as Secretary-Treasurer of the Society's Forum on History of Physics (2013-19). In 2010 Prof. Reed was appointed one of six Charles A. Dana Professors at Alma, and in 2017 named an "Alumni of Honour" at Waterloo. He formally retired at the end of 2017 and returned to the Halifax area, where he continues to teach part-time, serves as an Associate Editor with the American Journal of Physics, and does occasional consulting work.