Dr. Joan Carletta was awarded the Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1988, and the Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1994. She joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Akron in 1999. She is currently an assistant professor, and teaches classes in electronics, very large scale integration (VLSI) design, and computer architecture.

Dr. Carletta's research interests lie in the area of reconfigurable computing, VLSI design, and high level synthesis, particularly for digital signal processing applications. She is currently collaborating with University of Akron professor Robert Veillette on a project funded by the National Science Foundation on reconfigurable computing for real-time control systems. The project focusses on issues involved in the synthesis of field programmable gate array- (FPGA-) based implementations of digital controllers. Dr. Carletta is also collaborating with Dr. Amy Bell of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University on a wavelet-based image compression system. There, the focus is on the impact that hardware considerations play in how digital signal processing algorithms should be developed. Another project, with Dr. George Giakos of the University of Akron, involves techniques for real-time denoising of optical signals. Dr. Carletta has also worked with the Digital Communications Technology Branch at NASA Glenn Research Center on high performance digital filtering as part of the NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship Program.