Geary's research on children's mathematical development resulted in a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2005, the University of Missouri awarded Geary a Curators’ Professorship, and the Thomas Jefferson Professorship in 2009. Among other distinctions, he is 2009 co-recipient of the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology for the 2007 Psychological Science in the Public Interest monograph on sex differences in mathematics and science, co-authored with Halpern, Benbow, Gur, Hyde, and Gernsbacher. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (2005) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011).