She worked at the Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, and later at Saint Petersburg State University, where she attained the rank of Docent (Associate professor).
Girfanova was born in Weimar, which was then a city in East Germany (DDR), where her family was, probably, stationed at this time, working with the Soviet military.
Immediately upon graduation from Saint Petersburg State University Girfanova obtained a fellow position as a junior researcher (стажер-исследователь) at the department of Altaic languages at the Institute for Linguistics Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (in years 1952 – 1991: the Leningrad branch of Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR).
That was, in her own words in 2005, a painful crisis of her academic career: "two years ago the author, the only specialist in Udege language in the country, was fired from the Altaic department of ILI of RAS living out the rest of its days, abandoned by researchers and later abolished, in spite of the position of a scientific researcher successfully acquired three months before the department’s abolishment (I am the author of the only thesis of C. Sc.
[13] Fortunately, she was immediately hired by her alma mater, Saint Petersburg State University, as an associate professor (docent).
Unfortunately, she had to revert to teaching Albanian and Turkish languages, which considerably diminished time for academic research and publications.
[18] As Oliver Corff mentioned in his obituary for Girfanova, "Her critical understanding of the intentions and outcomes of Russia’s minority policies allowed her to come forward with substantial suggestions for improvements acknowledged by politicians.
In autumn 2017 she was invited by the Department of Interior Politics of Primorsky Krai as moderator for a course on the revival of the Udege language in the framework of a larger nationality policy programme from 2018 to 2020.