She is a Senior Investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center,[1] where she also serves as an Associate Research Director, and she is the Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

[2] Her work focuses on fundamental mechanisms of metabolic stress responses and the pathophysiology of diabetes complications.

[3] As an undergraduate, she performed her thesis work with Richard I. Morimoto Ph.D. in the laboratory of Matthew Meselson, Ph.D. She earned an M.D., cum laude from Harvard Medical School.

[5] In 1995, Schaffer joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis.

Her laboratory discovered that disruption of specific small nucleolar RNAs protects against lipid-induced cell death and alters metabolism, work that has provided a new understanding of how nutrient signals influence cellular homeostasis through non-coding RNAs.