Celia Reyes is the first female president of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS). She specializes in the field of econometrics and has conducted and published numerous research and policy papers on poverty assessments and evaluations of social protection programs.

She is also the network leader of the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS), providing free technical assistance to local government units in the country in the implementation of the CBMS. The CBMS is a local poverty monitoring tool she developed under the Micro Impacts of Macroeconomic Adjustment Policies project.

As an expert in poverty research, Reyes has been engaged as project leader and resource person in various consultancy projects of international organizations. She also served as president of the Philippine Economic Society in 2011 and has been an adviser to various national government technical working groups on poverty monitoring and indicator systems in the country since the early 1990s. She is currently the chairperson of the Interagency Committee on Poverty Statistics convened by the Philippine Statistics Authority, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Journal of Development, PIDS’ multidisciplinary social science journal that publishes policy-oriented studies and researches on development issues in the Asia-Pacific region.

Reyes has a Master of Arts degree in Economics from UP and a PhD degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.