Reiko was awarded her PhD in 2008. For her PhD study, she examined corrective feedback and learners' private speech in Japanese language classes. During her PhD, she published articles in several internationally refereed journals. Her book based on her PhD study 'Learners in Japanese Language Classrooms: Overt and Covert Participation' was published in 2009 by Continuum (now Bloomsbury).
She joined the University of South Australia in 2010 and has been coordinating and teaching Japanese courses from beginners to intermediate levels (both internal on-campus and external online courses) including Japanese In-Country course. Reiko developed digital online teaching materials and assessment tasks with audio visual resources to stimulate learning of students. She also created interesting classroom activities for students to use vocabulary and grammar items in conversations with their classmates. Students at intermediate level were given opportunities to communicate with Japanese university students in Japan through online text-chat app. Her teaching philosophy and approach are to develop learners' autonomy for Japanese language learning, by providing the learners appropriate scaffolding and giving them opportunities to find correct answers on their own.
Reiko is an associate editor of Frontier, Psychology, a desk editor of Journal of Intercutlural Communication, and a member of editorial board of Journal for Psychology of Language Learning. She is also a member of advisory board of Khazar University in the Republic of Azerbaijan. 
Reiko’s research is strongly connected with her teaching. She has carried out research projects about Japanese language learners’ beliefs about foreign language learning, their self-concepts as foreign language learners, their emotions in the language learning, in order to examine how those psychological factors affect their language learning. She also participated in a project about language use of refugee students, which was a funded project (AU$37,000), in collaboration with Multicultural Education and Language Committee and Adelaide Secondary School of English. Reiko’s research interest also includes autoethnography and she published her autoethnography as a Japanese academic in an Australian university in 2024. Findings of her research have been published in international peer-reviewed Q1-level journals, including Modern Language Journal, Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and Higher Education. Her book ‘Self-concept in Foreign Language Learning: A Longitudinal Study of Japanese Language Learners’ has been publised on May 7th, 2024 by Routledge.