Joan Centrella received her PhD from Cambridge University, where she was a student at the Institute of Astronomy. Following postdoctoral appointments at the University of Texas and the University of Illinois, she joined the faculty of Drexel University in the Physics Department. In 2001, she moved to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to join their newly-formed gravitational wave astrophysics group, where she leads their source modeling and numerical relativity effort in support of LISA. In 2004 she became head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory, which encompasses the gravitational wave and theoretical astrophysics groups at Goddard. Her research interests include black hole mergers, gravitational waves, numerical relativity, structure formation, and cosmology.