Safronova received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Notre Dame in 2001 and joined the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001 as a guest researcher. In 2003, she accepted a faculty position at the University of Delaware in the Department of Physics and Astronomy where she is currently a Professor. She is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute, NIST and University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include the study of fundamental symmetries, atomic clocks, searches for the variation in fundamental constants, optical cooling and trapping of neutral atoms, and the development of high-precision methods for calculating atomic properties. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Editorial board of the Physical Review A. In December 2011, Safronova was elected as an APS fellow for her "innovative development of high-accuracy first-principles methods of computational atomic structure and dynamics and their application to optical atomic clocks, quantum computing with neutral atoms and tests of fundamental symmetries." In 2012, Safronova received the American Physical Society's Woman Physicist of the Month award for August in recognition of her accomplishments as a researcher and mentor.