Dr. Schaeffer is a native Kentuckian, born in Louisville and raised in Lexington. Upon graduation from Henry Clay High School in 1980, he received the Rotary Club’s Milward Cup as Lexington’s Outstanding Senior. Dr. Schaeffer spent the next four years at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he graduated from the Honors English program cum laude after studying renaissance English literature and writing a thesis on Shakespeare’s romances. He also received an academic citation for his work in cellular biology. His college years also included semesters at Harvard University and the University of Granada in Granada, Spain. While in medical school at the University of Virginia, he was awarded a four month Medical Perspectives Fellowship by the SmithKline Beckman Foundation, one of thirty awarded nationally to fourth year medical students, to treat pediatric dysentery among refugees on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during the Soviet-Afghan war. During this project, he also treated war injuries and helped train Afghan mujahideen combat medics.
After graduating from medical school in 1989, Dr. Schaeffer began his surgical training at the University of Utah where he studied general surgery and urology. It was in Utah that he developed a love of pediatric surgical care and an interest in the field of reconstructive urology. In 1994, he was invited to be a Clinical Instructor and Fellow in Pediatric Urology at Duke University under the tutelage of Dr. Lowell King, the first full-time pediatric urologist in the United States. To further his studies in genital reconstruction, Dr. Schaeffer completed a two-year residency in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Louisville, concluding his studies in 1997. The highlight of these years was a trip to the Philippines to treat children with cleft lip and palate. After three years in the private practice of urology and plastic surgery in Denver, Colorado, including work at the Children’s Hospital of Denver, Dr. Schaeffer returned to Lexington to teach pediatric and reconstructive urology and plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky, eventually becoming the Chief of Pediatric Urology. In 2002, he opened a private surgical practice on the campus of Central Baptist Hospital (now Baptist Health Lexington) in pediatric and reconstructive urology and plastic surgery. He also performs surgery in Louisville at Norton Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Schaeffer is certified by the American Board of Urology and the American Board of Plastic Surgery, one of only a handful of surgeons similarly certified in the United States. Of these, he is the only one who is specifically trained in pediatric urology and who also holds a Certificate of Added Qualification in Pediatric Urology. He is a member of the American Urological Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and he is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is also a member of several state and local medical societies, and he has served as the President of the Kentucky Urological Society.
While broadly trained in urology and plastic surgery, Dr. Schaeffer’s primary clinical interest is pediatric urology with a special expertise in genital reconstruction and repair of congenital malformations of the urinary tract. He also enjoys general plastic surgery and the unique problems and challenges of that specialty.