Celia completed her undergraduate degree and Ph.D at UCL, after a short time Yale University on a scholarship programme, she returned to UCL for a post-doc. Following this she worked at University of Melbourne as a visiting research fellow and returned to UCL for a fellowship and then Lectureship. She joined University of Exeter as a Senior Lecturer in May 2013 and was given a Chair in Psychopharmacology in 2015. She currently also holds an Honorary Readership at University College London.

She is interested in the effects of drugs and alcohol on the brain and behaviour. Her research has concentrated on examining both the benefits and side effects of recreational drugs on cognition, mental health and neurobiology. Through behavioural, neuroimaging studies and clinical trials, she has investigated the potentially therapeutic sides of controlled substances in clinical trials aimed at the treatment of addiction and in particularly looking at drugs such as ketamine and MDMA in combination with psychological therapies.