Carena was a general councilor of the American Physical Society (APS); chair of the Division of Particle and Fields of APS; and a member of the APS Committee on International Scientific Affairs. She is a former chair of the DPF Nominating Committee. She served on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) of the U.S. DOE / NSF High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). From 2004 through 2019, Carena was a member of the Aspen Center for Physics. In 2021 she was appointed as a member of the Argentinian Academy of Exact, Physical, and Natural Sciences.