Joan Centrella

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Joan Mary Centrella is an American astrophysicist who uses computer simulations to study gravity, gravitational waves, gravitational lenses, and binary black holes. She was deputy director of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Astrophysics Science Division and now serves as Executive in Residence for Science and Technology Policy at West Virginia University. She earned a summa cum laude BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1975 and a Ph.D. from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy in 1980. After postdoctoral work at the University of Texas and the University of Illinois, she taught at the University of Texas and became an associate professor of physics at Drexel University in 1984. She joined Goddard in 2001, became deputy director in 2010, and moved to West Virginia University in 2019. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1998). NASA awards include the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (2007), the John C. Lindsay Memorial Award for Space Science (2008), and the Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement Award for Mentoring (2013).