[1] Although partly of Japanese descent, Schafer-Nameki is originally from Swabia in Germany.
[3] She completed her Ph.D. in 2003; her dissertation, D-Branes in Boundary Field Theory, was supervised by Peter Goddard.
She took a position as a lecturer at King's College London in 2010, and was promoted to reader in 2014.
[5] She was the principal investigator for the five-year European Research Council project "Higgs bundles: Supersymmetric Gauge Theories and Geometry" which began in 2016.
[6][7] In 2020 she joined the Simons Collaboration on Special Holonomy in Geometry, Analysis, and Physics as one of its Principal Investigators.