Kelly Shaffer is an Associate Professor in the Center for Behavioral Health and Technology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and has specialized training in psychooncology and dyadic data analysis. Her research examines caregiving burden among cancer caregivers (i.e., family members or friends who provide a patient unpaid care due to the patient’s illness), with the goal to modernize and expand psychosocial care delivery to cancer caregivers through scalable and effective technology-based interventions. She has led clinical trials evaluating SHUTi among family caregivers (NCT04986904, NCT04661306). She currently leads a factorial trial of Internet-delivered intervention components to address cancer-related sexual dysfunction among breast cancer survivors (trial registry pending).
Dr. Shaffer received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Miami, where she received a National Cancer Institute F31 National Research Scholar Award. She completed her clinical internship with the Behavioral Medicine Service at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital and her postdoctoral training as a National Cancer Institute T32 Psychooncology Research Fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She can typically be found eating doughnuts and/or petting her beloved greyhound.