Ernst Shaefer

Dr. Ernst J. Schaefer grew up in Old Lyme, CT and goes there in the summer. Ernie has been married to Mary Miller for over 50 years, and they are blessed to have three children and 7 grandchildren. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Dartmouth Medical School (2-year program) and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (class of 1972). He did an internal medicine residency at Mt. Sinai and an endocrinology fellowship at the National Institutes of Health where he also served for 7 years as a senior investigator and head of the clinical service in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He then served for 30 years as the director of the Lipid Metabolism Laboratory at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University and as an associate professor and distinguished university professor at Tufts University Schools of Medicine and Nutrition, and as the director of the Lipid and Heart Disease Prevention Clinic at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. It was his honor and privilege to work with many talented visiting scientists, endocrinology fellows, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and medical students. He continues to serve as a collaborating investigator with the Framingham Heart Study, and as a faculty member at the Tufts University School of Medicine and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

Since 2007, he has served as the co-founder, chief medical officer, and laboratory director of Boston Heart Diagnostics in Framingham, MA which was acquired by Eurofins International in 2015. The laboratory provides specialized chemistry and genetic analyses to healthcare providers for the diagnosis and prevention of cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, kidney disease, thyroid disease, and many other disorders. He also serves as the president of the Dyslipidemia Foundation (supports research and award recognition in the area of cholesterol metabolism and heart disease prevention), and Cardiovascular Research Associates (consulting group). He is best known for his research on the nutritional, genetic, hormonal, and pharmacologic regulation of plasma lipoproteins, and the diagnosis and treatment of lipid disorders for the prevention of cardiovascular disease. He is the author or co-author of over 600 publications. For his research he has received over twenty awards including the Dartmouth Medical School Lifetime Achievement Award, the Horowitz and Merker Awards from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and Hospital, a distinguished faculty award from Tufts University, the Irving Page and Lyman Duff Awards from the American Heart Association, the McCollum Award from the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Lipid Association, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.