Celeste is a Professor in the departments of Chemical & Biological Engineering and Molecular Biology at Princeton University. After earning S.B. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biology at MIT in 1998, Celeste attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she was awarded her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2003 for work completed with Christopher Chen. Celeste then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Mina Bissell's group in the Life Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Celeste's contributions to the fields of tissue mechanics and morphogenesis have been recognized by a number of awards, including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, the MIT TR35, the Allan P. Colburn Award from the AIChE, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and a Faculty Scholar award from the HHMI. Celeste's accomplishments in teaching have been recognized by Princeton's SEAS Distinguished Teacher Award and the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Celeste is currently the director of the undergraduate certificate program in Engineering Biology and the graduate certificate program in Bioengineering.