[2] She worked under the mentorship of Dr. Ralf Ignatius and then in 2001, Schaefer won the USA-Scholarship of the German National Merit Foundation and to pursue a research internship at The Rockefeller University.
[1] As a Visiting Student, Schaefer worked under the mentorship of Dr. Michel Nussenzweig at Rockefeller studying immunology, specifically the adaptive immune lymphocytes called B cells.
[1] In the Greengard Lab, Schaefer switched her research focus in the direction of neuroscience and explored epigenetic regulation of neural physiology.
[5] Schaefer is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai School and remains an adjunct faculty member at Rockefeller University.
[7] Further highlighting the role of genetic regulation in brain homeostasis, Schaefer showed in 2009 that a deficiency in the histone methyltransferase complex GLP/G9a leads to defects in learning, motivation, and environmental adaptation in rodents.
[9] She found that a deficiency in argonaute 2 (a gene known to regulate the generation of miRNA) in the dopamine receptor 2 (Drd2) positive cells in the striatum caused a decrease in the motivation to seek cocaine.
[9] Once Schaefer started her lab at Mount Sinai, she continued to probe the role of transcriptional regulation on neuronal function and driving behavior.
Her lab identified the bromodomain and extraterminal domain-containing proteins (BETs) as potent regulators of genes involved in generating ASD-type behaviors in mouse models.
[12] Another facet of Schaefer's work is understanding the impact of epigenetic regulation on neuroimmunity, with a particular focus on the innate immune cells of the brain, microglia.
[1] In 2011, Schaefer was part of a team that filed a patent for a method of translational profiling and molecular phenotyping of mRNAs from specific cell types.
[16] In 2013, Schaefer and her postdoctoral advisor, Dr. Paul Greengard, filed a patent for a therapeutic strategy to treat or reduce the likelihood of seizures.